Josephine Baker’s Banana Skirt
In some ways I am a cultural illiterate. When Dr. Faustus commented on yesterday’s Banana Bra post that we should “Cf. the Josephine Baker caricature in Les Triplettes de Belleville I was like “OK, fine, I’m going to have to Google all that.” Josephine Baker I knew to be a vaudevillian/stripper who made it big in Europe and with that, I was out of clues.
Ho, boy. Let’s start with her Wikipedia. If she didn’t invent the banana-as-inadequate-attire concept, she surely was its most famous popularizer, in the form of the banana skirt that took Europe by storm:
But what about Faustus’s reference? That’s to a 2003 animated movie, in which a parody of Baker’s famous dance routine is featured:
Since this is just the sort of YouTube video that’s always gone a year after I post it, here are a few more durable screenshots as well:
Those are not pesky monkeys stealing Josephine’s bananas in this last screenshot; those are tiny oppressed hungry husbands from the audience.
Thanks, Faustus!
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Lady Gaga got so much press for her meat dress – and so many people forget that she’s hardly the first to have “outrageous” costumes. Josephine Baker and Carmen Miranda both were way ahead of her, with fruit.
That said, the media storm that would erupt today over someone wearing this particular costume is mind boggling to think about.
I wonder if Ruth Negga could be persuaded to do another historical biopic of an iconic African American? A heroine of the civil rights movement in the US and of the French Resistance, who was recognised as a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur. Also the first African-American to star in a major film, in 1927.
May or may not be available in the territory where you are, but the French/German TV company ARTE has a documentary on Josephine Baker.
Today, 19 April 2019 it can be viewed on
https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/075185-000-A/josephine-baker-ikone-der-befreiung/
It’s in German.