Prizes are here! A huge thank-you to everyone who participated in the contest. I’m in awe of all the beautiful costumes, the boundless creativity, and the warm sense of camaraderie in our little community. I was delighted to see so many familiar faces again and thrilled to welcome new participants to our contest. I will […]
It’s time for the annual Dress Parade Costume Contest! This is the first year with our new name, but it’s still the same contest. We’ve tweaked the categories and the rules just a teensy bit as part of our never-ending quest to make things simpler and clearer. This year we have eight prize categories spread […]
The great transition has happened: Take Back Halloween has now become Dress Parade. You’re on our new site, which we’ve been working all summer to get ready. It looks exactly like the old site, but the backend is updated and we have a new server. Now that our innards are good, we can upload new […]
Queen Victoria (1819-1901) was the second longest-ruling female monarch in history, exceeded only by the late Queen Elizabeth II. People often think of her as the elderly widow of her later years, but the movie The Young Victoria and the ITV series Victoria reminded us that she was frisky once. They also reminded us (if […]
LaSiren, also spelled La Sirène, is the Haitian mermaid goddess of the sea. Her mythological pedigree is impressive: enslaved Africans brought with them the memory of a great female water spirit, combined it with existing Taino legends about a sea creature, and added European mermaid imagery. The result was La Sirène, the reigning queen of […]
Ching Shih, or Madame Ching (1775-1844), has been called the most successful pirate in history. For one thing, there was the sheer size of her operation: her Red Flag Fleet consisted of at least 40,000 pirates, with some estimates ranging as high as 80,000. In terms of power, she was unprecedented: the navies of China, […]
Her face is one of the most famous in the world. Nefertiti (ca. 1370–1330 BCE) was the Great Royal Wife of the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten, and her sublime portrait bust is one of the glories of ancient Egyptian art. The woman herself is still a mystery, although the clues about her are tantalizing. Her prominence […]
If you’re unfamiliar with Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-1689), you might wonder why there are so many pictures of men in our main illustration. It’s because Christina liked to dress as a man—not all the time, but often enough that she was famous for it. Unfortunately there are no nice paintings of her in masculine […]
Of all the great bird goddesses in world mythology, the Morrigan is surely one of the birdiest. This Irish goddess typically appears as a crow or raven hovering over the battlefield, feasting on the corpses of the slain. She’s a carrion bird, basically; the Celts, like their Germanic neighbors, saw these birds as she-demons or […]
Catherine the Great (1729-1796) was probably the best tsar Russia ever had. She arrived in the country as a teenaged German bride, and eventually took the throne in a coup that deposed her idiot husband. For 34 years she reigned as Empress and Autocrat of All the Russias, expanding the nation’s borders and turning it […]
In the relentlessly patriarchal society of New Spain, there was no place for a girl genius. Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695) was a prodigy: she could read and write by the age of three, was fluent in Latin by the age of ten, and by her late teens was famous for her brilliance in […]
In ancient Vietnam, before the Chinese came, women were clan rulers and queens. Society was built on what seems to have been a gender-equal footing, and women routinely wielded political power, went to war, ran homes and businesses, and even took multiple husbands if they could afford it. This was the civilization that produced the […]
