Some interesting carnival stuff

[dianeduane]

Just going through the blogroll and revisiting some old favorites preparatory to cleaning the present list up.

One I’ve always liked is “Rubber Slippers in Italy”. Here Rowena posts about the Carnivale in Schignano and its traditions about the Bei and the Brut — “the Beautiful and the Ugly.”

Peter read this over my shoulder and said, “Isn’t it interesting how cultural stereotypes shift over time. Once if you had a big belly, or were pale from not having to work outside in the fields, it was a sign you were wealthy and successful. Now it’s all tans and abs…”

 

 

Comments

[occams_pyramid]

In the song "Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor" the rival girl is dismissed as "The brown girl", which is enough to condemn her. And of course 'fair' meant 'pale'.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

And tans may be on the way out, if certain health and safety advocates have their way.

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

real tans are already mostly on their way out in most quarters - it's all spray tans if the level of orange is anything to go by. The few people you see with a really dark actual tan these days are rich 50-something and over italians. And boy does the level of leathering on their skin show.

[noirrosaleen.livejournal.com]

Totally off-topic - may I swipe your icon, and if so, whom should I credit?

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

sorry, no, this one was made specially for me.

[noirrosaleen.livejournal.com]

Drat. Thank you anyway!

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

The Coco Chanel shift is always quite fascinating (she comes back from cruise with tan, the fashionable go 'oooooooo') because having a tan suddenly means the leisure time to actually get one - workers having shifted to the cities for the most part so you were pale if you were working class, and cheap food was full of fat. Then on top of that the 1920s fashions and trend for 'health and nutrition'.

Which struck me when looking at an advert for an 18thC exhibition on the tube. I was staring at the model's hands and realising just how chubby they were (she was what we'd call fat, but holding her neck in a way that you couldn't see her chins), and trying to remember when I'd last seen someone with hands like that. And then realised they'd been wearing a tracksuit, had been wearing half a tonne of crappy 'gold' jewellery and had their hair lacquered into submission. Because these days it's only the working class you expect to get fat to the extent that their hands look like an 18th century noble's.

[dragondances.livejournal.com]

I always used that comparison in the (admittedly pessimistic) argument about how far people will go to achieve whatever the cultural standard for beauty is. When the standard was fat and pale, people (especially actors and nobles) would gorge on sweets and champagne and sometimes take arsenic, which would whiten their skin and eventually kill them. Now that the standard is tan and thin, we have the problems with skin cancer and eating disorders, which can be just as deadly.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

I've had that thought, about being pale versus tanned. Tanned used to be code for "manual labor" and now it means "enjoying life outdoors." Another quirk is to think of how the ideal of ancient Egyptians appears in their art-- the men as tanned and the women as pale.