Costume Behaving Badly: Poverty, Disease and Disgust in Early Twentieth-Century New York Vaudeville

Abstract

The early twentieth-century Broadway stages and US vaudeville circuits boasted numerous successful performers, costumiers, producers and directors who understood that their luxurious costumes were crucial to a production’s success because they supported the show’s narrative and the performer’s personal brand. Costumes were themselves “actors” that performed via an actress’s body to reflect the social, cultural and economic landscapes they inhabited, spinning tales of notoriety, extravagance and celebrity that proved potent to audiences. In some cases, however, Broadway and vaudeville costumes were unruly, behaving in unintended ways and telling audiences stories that differed from a show’s narrative and highlighting social anxieties that audiences had come to the theater to escape. Drawing on theories of agency in costume and textile semantics, this article analyses early twentieth-century accounts of costumes behaving badly to argue that those reviled as disgusting by theater critics and audiences reflected classed fears of poverty and disease.