Pageant Dresses for All!
One of the most impressive aspect of Pageantry was the costumes. Often, when seen up close, rather than from at a distance, chainmail was stiflingly-warm knitted wool and pearls were mere painted chestnuts. Nonetheless, the spectacle of one Pageant in 1934 led a leader writer for the Times to contrast the colourful display of Pageantry costumes with more austere contemporary fashions:
‘The Pageants, which from Ludlow and Thanet to the Albert Hall now give innumerable citizens the chance to see themselves as more or less distant centuries would have seen them, must provoke the reflection in many a man that he looks much better and feels twice the fellow clad as a Saxon Warrior or Elizabethan lad of parts. Why, he is asking himself, am I so fortified and set up by my garments for the mere business of walking on and off a lawn, when for my real occupation I am expected to carry on without any help other than a lounge suit can lend?
‘The town councillor who has voted in support of a pageant project is peculiarly tempted to ask this question. He cannot see why, if a vivid presentation of the past is calculated to stimulate local patriotism and outside interest, the daily duties of public life might not be the better performed in costume which was a striking reminder of past greatness and the traditions that had to be maintained.’
The writer went on to suggest that despite the sombre attire brought about by Victorians ‘the shades of the Witenagemot are not to be forgotten, and a town council or assembly of free citizens is no inappropriate place to hear the heavy tread of free Saxon warriors coming to deliberate.’ The article encouraged the Council member to wear their town's livery including colours and a coat of arms, in the way that judges wore wigs and Oxford undergraduates sub-fusc.
Not satisfied with livening up the local council sessions, the writer went on to conclude: ‘What a waste, then, of the past, and of the many uniforms which our forefathers have invented and embellished with moving associations, to practise the asceticism – it is no less – of only allowing the dresses which were the normal thing in the nineteenth century. There are members of Parliament who would obviously be able to acquit themselves better if they were allowed to dress as Roundheads, and others who would feel twice the man in Regency costume.’
Source: ‘Pageant Dresses for All’, Times 9 July 1934, p. 15.