Shakespeare's Ladies Paper Doll

Tell a roomful of students you want to talk about the 18th (or any other) century for the next few weeks, and you’re likely to get a roomful of glassy-eyed stares. But show the same group a picture of a man and women in period costume, and you establish an immediate context for the rest of whatever it is you really want to teach. With fashion as a visual jumping off place, it’s easy to ask them what movies they’ve seen with similar clothes and to help them pinpoint the right period. Still photos of actors in costume can help them remember relevant movies.

Once they’re thinking about the movies (and hopefully a few books) they’re familiar with, you can ask them about transportation (Did everyone ride horses? Had trains been invented? Could ships make it across the ocean?), living conditions (Did they have electricity? Running water? Refrigeration?) and other topics. Sometimes working through these questions will even give students an idea of the famous people major historical events of the era. Once students can picture the past and place it in a context, they’re ready to learn more about it.

Going into additional detail about the clothing itself can help students move beyond events and begin to think about the ideas prevalent in the period.  A student who knows that fashionable 18th century women wore skirts so wide they sometimes had to turn sideways to pass through doorways can begin to wonder whether such a woman’s dress influenced the way her society regarded her – or the other way around. The contrast between a gentleman’s lace-trimmed sleeves and embroidered coat and a workman’s rough clothing can become the starting place for a discussion of social inequities and the revolutions in America and Europe.

Students who have learned to think in this way are better able to grasp the flow and sequence of history instead of parroting unrelated facts. And for many students – like me when I was a student and like many of the students I’ve taught over the years – history goes down much better with a spoonful of fashion to sweeten it.

I got interested in proms – well, not in high school. Like the rest of the geeky girls, I went to the movies on prom night. (My prom-eligible years happened back in the Stone Age when girls had to have dates to get into the prom – no date, no prom. This part of high school seems more humane now.)

Proms got interesting to me in 2007, thirty-something long years after I happily shook the high school dust off my feet. Actually, it wasn’t so much proms that got my attention as homecoming – another high school tradition that passed me by. I was attracted to homecoming because my boss at the community college where I work told me to be – always a motivation for deep interest.

I expected a disaster because never having attended a homecoming, I didn’t have the slightest idea how to help coordinate a homecoming queen event. Fortunately, the girls knew what to do. They were serious about the affair even though the college is small and so is the normal game attendance. My main role was to write down the names of the nominees for the announcer, to order the flowers and sashes, to staple fallen hems, and to hold hands (metaphorically) with nervous hopefuls and disappointed also-rans. It was fun. The girls were beautiful, even the basketball players. One minute they were loping across the court in saggy uniforms and almost literally the next, they were floating down the runway in evening gowns.

At first I tried to come up with a homecoming paper doll, but that was hard because of the problem of team names and mascots. I couldn’t think of name and mascot that had a universal feel. So then I thought of proms. Well, actually, the thought came in the mail. The sponsor for student activities at my school gets big catalogs of geegaw – some of it for proms (even though we don’t have a prom). I happened to pop into her office one day when a catalog had landed on her desk. It was a eureka moment.

Although I work at a college, I’ve had in mind high school proms when I created Prom Night 2007 and Prom Night 2009. I used current prom magazines (I didn’t know there were such things, but there are!) and tried to make the paper dolls look like sweet and pretty teenage girls. I’ve found that most little girls of almost any age enjoy the idea of swishy skirts and high heels, so I haven’t been surprised that Prom Night 2007 has been downloaded many, many times (it’s free). I hope Prom Night 2009 will be as much fun.

Feel free to download either or both of the Prom Night paper dolls at the website.