The company Christmas party this year took place at Såstaholm. It’s a place with a story, and the theatre theme ran strong through the entire interior. There were posters, photos, rooms named after recipients of their annual prize to young actors etc.
But better than all that was their collection of theatre costumes. Two large rooms in the basement were full of real, “retired” costumes from the Royal Opera and the Royal Dramatic Theatre. After we’d all eaten the traditional julbord, while some people went to the bar for drinks, others went downstairs to play dress-up. Later there were pirates and bishops and counts in capes in the crowd hanging out at the bar.
I found this amazing, wonderful skirt: black, floor length, wide and swishy, with several different luxurious fabrics, all shimmering and lacy. Underneath and between the visible layers there were hidden swathes of yet more fabric. With all its layers upon layers of cloth, the skirt was far heavier than my thick winter coat!
Looking inside I found one part that was like a thick tail, a rope of fabric tied together with string. It was bunched up at the top but the rest simply hung down, longer than the front of the skirt. I think it was supposed to add some fullness at the back, and structure and heaviness to the “train”. When I walked, the tail trailed behind me, invisibly under the skirt, and just sort of made the visible fabric fall differently. Quite an interesting construction detail, I thought.
I kind of wished I could take the skirt home and have it forever. But then again it was so supremely impractical that I would hardly ever wear it, not even for parties. That thing would be quite impossible to wear outside the house, but also nearly impossible to wear among other people. (Among modern people, that is, who are unused to walking among ladies with trailing skirts. I guess people used to manage, two hundred years ago.) Even as I was trying it on, someone already stepped on the fringe of the train. But still…
There were a few other skirts and dresses and corsets that I wanted to try, but couldn’t fit into. Here’s one from The Nutcracker that seems to have been used in six seasons, from 1984 to 1991. The label says “vita par” so I guess it was used for some “white pair” dance.
I’m not exactly large, but the ballerinas must be truly tiny to fit into those things! I know that they are super slim, so I wasn’t entirely surprised when the skirt waists were way to narrow for me. But even the corset tops were far too small. I don’t understand how they can have rib cages as narrow as that.
Maybe they were teenagers when they wore it, I thought. But I looked up one of the dancers (the things you can do with Google nowadays!) and, no, she was 24.