Ballet Tutu - Child Dresses for Dance | Dynadans

ballet tutu

Every girl has a beautiful fantasy about the dress, ballet tutu dress is a dress that can meet the beautiful imagination of all girls, fluffy, light, every girl who wears ballet tutu pink, will certainly imagine in the bottom of her heart that she is a fairy in a fairy tale, right?

What does tutu mean in ballet? It is an important visual element in the ballet, igniting many people's ballet dreams, and it represents the romantic and elegant image of women who have been glorified as if they do not belong to the world. How did it evolve? 

Renaissance and Baroque period - elaborate and gorgeous style

During the Renaissance period in Italy and France, ornate styles were popular in the courts. The style of ballet costumes also followed the royal trend, so lace and shoes with heels appeared on the ballet stage in that era.

By the 17th century, silk, brocade and embroidery became the main materials for ballet dresses, with gold and precious stones as embellishments. While female dancers' attire remained ornate, male dancers began to add symbolic decorations to their costumes that represented character or profession, such as scissors for tailors.

In 18th century France, the Rococo style became popular in the ballet world: ballet women's dresses were trimmed with ruffles, long ribbons, and lace. After the French Revolution, men's dressing began to change, with a conservative and plain neo-classical style becoming popular.

In the early 19th century, with the flourishing of the textile and handicraft industry, ballet dancers were outfitted on stage with corsets, flower crowns, corsages, and necklace bracelets. 

Changes in ballet fashion - the advent of the Romantic tutu

Italian ballerina Maria Taglioni was the first ballerina in the world to wear pointe shoes and reform the baroque dress, and in 1832 she started a wave of ballet costumes when she danced on her toes in a light gown her father had designed for her during a performance of The Nymphs.

Another theory is that the father came up with the design to hide his daughter's imperfections in her figure. The top of the dress was a corseted bodice that exposed the neck, and the length of the hanging bell-style sarong was at mid-calf, making the dancer appear lighter and highlighting the delicate tip-toe movements.

Romantic ballet has been born since then, and artists have created many stage classics - "The Nymphs", "Giselle", etc. The dancers celebrated emotions and worshipped nature, often creating transcendent nymphs, ghosts and other dance images in their works, and the dance movements were beautiful in their lightness and fluidity, and the long tulle dresses were just right for such lightness and elegance. 

TUTU dress - a typical dance dress of classical ballet

Tsarist Russia was very conservative in the early 19th century and did not accept the new style of dance dresses. But half a century later, ballet developed greatly in Russia, and the ballet tutu dress, which we see everywhere on the stage today, appeared in Russia at that time.

The professional ballet tutu dress quickly became popular because in Russia at the time, dance techniques were becoming more and more advanced, and dancers naturally favored dresses that allowed for free movement of the legs in order to accomplish difficult dance techniques.

Marius Petipa, the master choreographer of classical ballet, created a number of masterpieces of fairy tale ballet, such as Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and Raimunda, which led to fantasy style costumes becoming very popular. 

The 20th century - the individual liberation of ballet costumes

In the early 20th century, under the influence of Russian choreographer Mikhail Fokine, the dress length of the actress was gradually extended to the knee again. This design was intended to accentuate calf and toe movements, as well as the effect of spinning, which required a higher level of stage skill on the part of the performer.

Across the ocean, Isadora Duncan, the founder of modern dance and an American dancer, shocked many with her draped head and bare feet on stage. Under her influence, many performers abandoned their very uncomfortable corsets in favor of loose-fitting dress robes.

In the 1910 performance of "Heavenly Creatures", the actors' costumes again took on a previously rare Middle Eastern style, which was closely related to the painting, design, and fashion worlds turning their overall interest to the East during this time.

By the 1930s, ballet costume design was practically free from any strictures of traditional thought. In some postmodern productions, such as Matthew Bourne's version of Swan Lake, the traditional role of the slender little swan was played by male actors with leg hair who did not wear tops at all. 

Girls ballet tutu, in addition to speaking to the role, also frames the dancer's movements, and its structure supports the physicality of the ballet. Wearing a professional ballet tutu generally marks the mature stage of a classical ballet dancer's career, as nothing brings out the full lines of the body and exposes every little detail of technique like a tutu.

Classical ballet tutu has the following three main parts: the bodice, the basque and the dress.

In terms of classification, there are long dresses for Romantic ballet and short dresses for classical ballet, the main ones are as follows.

  1. Romantic tutu: Today's Romantic tutus are still based on the dresses of the time, with modern materials making the word lighter and more transparent, usually made of 5-6 layers of veil, with a hemline between the knee and ankle.
  1. Bell tutu: The bell tutu is located between the classical ballet tutu and the romantic tutu.
It is made of several layers of tulle and stands out like the classical ballet tutu, but the thin layers are longer and have a downward sag, usually to mid-thigh.
  1. Pancake tutu: By 1870, Italian ballerinas, bent on perfecting their pointe technique, began wearing tutus cut above the knee, allowing them to show more of their legs and increasingly complex footwork, and adding pants under the dress. To make the dress protrude from the hips, it was supported by iron rings embedded in its various layers. It was short and stiff, looking like a pancake, with a crinkled yarn surface.
  1. Platter tutu: Much like the pancake tutu, but it is not held in place by wire, it is made of 10 to 12 layers of stiff yarn sewn on a flat, decorated surface.
  1. Powder puff tutu: Also known as the Balanchine-style tutu, it was originally created for the ballet version of Georges Bizet's "Symphony in C.

It is a short ballet tutu dress with fewer layers of knotted netting, not as prominent as the pancake and platter tutus, and without wire loops to support it, it looks looser. This allows the tutu to move more with the dancer, while giving her a softer, fuller appearance.

Girls ballet tutu is more than just a tutu, with layers of tulle and stiff fabric stacked on top of each other to create the art of ballet dance over the centuries.

Not only that, but the ballet tutu dress has also become a fashion favourite today, with many famous designers taking inspiration from ballet and the two making each other's mark, and the art of ballet becoming more widely appreciated as the tutu dress crosses borders.

@Dynadans