Revealed: The fascinating (and seedy) roots of the traditional Baby Dolls of Mardi Gras

baby dolls 4Mardi Gras celebrations date from the city’s  French founding in 1718.

The Baby Dolls had an important role in  post-Katrina Louisiana as well. A group called the 504 Eloquent Baby Dolls of  New Orleans formed, named in part for a telephone area code.

They marched with the tribe of Mardi Gras  Indians, as well as the Skull and Bones club.

The Louisiana Weekly, the newspaper of the  New Orleans black community, identified the Million Dollar Baby Dolls in 1939 as  among the city’s oldest African-American masking groups, Dr Vaz told the  Associated Press last month.

The earliest known photographs of baby doll  maskers are cells from a 1931 film that doesn’t make clear whether they were  prostitutes or mainstream revellers.baby dolls 5

‘Even today, those in the Baby Boom  generation recall their mothers and grandmothers warning them against the lewd  and lascivious behavior evidenced by many a Baby Doll on Carnival Day,’ Dr Vaz  wrote in her book, ‘The Baby Dolls: Breaking the Race and Gender Barriers of the  New Orleans Mardi Gras Tradition.’

The first of the current baby doll troupes  apparently started in the 1980s, when Merline Kimble and friends revived her  grandparents’ Gold Digger Club of baby doll maskers.

baby dolls 6The late Antoinette K-Doe created the group  named for her husband, Ernie K-Doe, in 2003 with friends including Reed,  Trepagnier and praline store owner ‘Tee-Eva’ Perry.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2280055/Meet-Baby-Dolls-Mardi-Gras–grown-women-men-parade-parasols-pacifiers-pay-homage-costumes-seedy-past.html#ixzz2SuBw5J8P Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

 

 

 

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