I feel I should start this post with a little about Irish Dancing and a little about the dresses to give you some context. We came into Irish Dancing expecting a gentle, folky scene, uhm, not quite! Turns out that Irish Dancing is intense high octane stuff! No beards, wet wool or geography teachers in sight.
(Personal disclosure: my maternal grandmother was full-blooded Irish, but we have no cultural heritage from her because she died of pneumonia, when my mother was a babe in arms. My mother's foster mother was from a German Catholic background.)
We joined the class not knowing anything about Feises until our dance teacher, a couple of months into the lessons suggested we head out to one. A Feis is a dance competition. These competitions are organised according to the child's age and skill level. There are chances to win trophies and medals and move up levels as you win. Once the child has moved from Novice, to Primary to Intermediate they can wear a fancy-dress and make-up and a big curly wig!?! After Intermediate comes Open, where all the kids will be wearing full on costumes, for sure.
I still don't have an eye for Irish Dance fashion. My tastes run towards the more subtle and homely end of things. This is of course wrong, wrong, wrong. Below is my eldest daughter dancing in a class feis in her new dress. She was thrilled. Her teacher, not so much so. We had a "real" Feis the next morning, where of course dear daughter was desperate to wear the dress again, so I was up till midnight making further changes (I had already re-done this thing 3 times!) Below is the dress as I made it initially.
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| Dress in action at Class Feis (Before changes) |
Below is the dress with changes. These are the changes I needed to make: - Raise the neckline
- Tighten the bodice
- Pad out the hips and skirt?! (weird, but less offensive than fake boobs on a 7 year old, I guess.)
- Shorten the skirt, turns out skirts should be very short and back of skirt should be an inch shorter than the front.
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| Dress after changes |
Here is the inside of the dress, I used bag stiffener to sew in a cone from the waist down to create the illusion of a waist that the teacher wanted and to hold the skirt out smartly. You'll notice that I am no longer tacking down the lining but letting it hang free. After three times tacking down the lining, I have now seen the error of my ways.
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| Inside of dress with stiffener. |
Here is the back of the dress. My daughter wanted a bow, rather than a cape which is a bit of a trend with the younger girls at the moment.
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| Back of dress with bow rather than traditional cape. |
For those of you who are still with me, I will say a few things about the big-time dresses. While at the class Feis a mom whose two daughters are very, very good dancers (think top five in the world) let me have a good look at their dresses which were made in Dublin at great expense. Now, this was an education. These were not dresses, so much as costumes. Something to bear in mind if I ever do this again. No need for lapped zippers and slipped stitch lining, etc. The dresses were thick pile polyester velvet in day-glo colours. The embroidery was thick, bold and graphic. There was underlining in the form of cotton batiste that was serged to each pattern piece of embroidered velvet and then the dress was sewn up. So, it was almost like a Hong Kong finish, but simply with serged seams. There was no lining. This would make these expensive costumes much easier to alter for growing children. The zips were big and chunky and simply centered down the back, not much care was taken in inserting them. Finally, the skirts, though appearing to be soft, were actually supported by stiff padded panels that run from the waist down to create the illusion of waists and hips on slim, prepubescent girls.
Some of this stuff is a shock for a parent. Why the wigs? To make them look like they are jumping higher. Why the makeup? To be seen on stage and to balance out the face against the crazy wig and wild dress. Why the fluorescent dresses? To be noticed by the judge while sharing the stage with two other dancers. Why the fake tanner? To look healthy under the stage lights, and define the leg muscles. Why the padded hips? To keep the skirt full and create a waist. But why is that necessary? I'm stumped.
Like most parents, I am a little uneasy with some of this. My husband is definitely uneasy. But, the way I see it is this, the dancing is beautiful, fun, good exercise and good discipline. All this stage stuff is just that, stage stuff. My kids had to wear a full face of makeup at aged three to be in their ballet summer show and no one batted an eyelash at that, so I guess this isn't all that different. And the little girls love it!
My final word has to be this though, remember the girls from class that I said were so good? Seeing them in class fresh scrubbed with shorts, tshirt and ponytails flying through air like something from another world is more jaw-dropping, more gobsmacking, than they ever look to me at feis covered in all that polyester, nylon and goop.
