Mardi 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.
‘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.
The 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.
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