19.05.12

Happened before?), a woman dressed like an off-duty 1940s chorine is showing off two pumps, one silver, one black, both high and ankle-strapped, with vamps so deep they nearly reveal toe-cleavage. The other kind of cleavage is amply displayed in a short dress of ruched velvet and starry stretch. "Do they have to be black?" she asks, twisting one shapely ankle and then the other. Behind her, sleek lovelies in sable and jet cut elegant shapes as they try on top hats. They don't laugh or blush like most people do when they drape boas; they become the clothes—heiresses and their swanky consorts, pimps and princes, starlets and high-class strollers, denizens of the demimonde, the floating world. They are the Dolls, after all, and no one does costume the way they do.

For most ballet companies, the Cinderella moment is stock-in-trade (even Sewell likes to give audiences their "tutu fix"), but ballet dancers affect to scorn their own fancy dress. You can't let the tutu touch you. Typically tatty things with rows of hook-and-eye armor rattling across their backs, tutus are warhorses; their glory is for the audience.

Source: Twin Cities Planet