The tutu is the symbol of ballet, the iconic representation of La Danse. The tutu is celebrated in venues as diverse as the painter Degas's pastel sketches of ballerinas to a little girl's dreams of becoming a ballerina with the magnificent theatre stages where Ballet is performed in between.
But tutus are relative newcomers to the world of ballet. When the first ballets took place in Italian Renaissance courts during the 1600s, the female dancers wore their own dresses when dancing The pannier-style skirts and long-sleeved bodices that did very little to facilitate fancy footwork and graceful arm movements in Ballet.
Even after the Italian princess Catherine de Medici married the French King Henri II and brought the dance to the French court as the Ballets de Cour, costumery continued to obscure rather than call attention to the legs supporting the graceful dancers.
The first Ballet de Cour was the famous Ballet Comique de la Reine which took place in Paris in 1581 as part of a wedding celebration when Henry III's favourite, the Duke de Joyeuse married Marguerite, the sister of the queen consort Louise of Lorraine. Queen Louise arranged for the composer and choreographer Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx to devise a five and a half hour dance extravaganza. The spectacle, based on the Greek myth of Circe the enchantress, cost over one million écu to produce and starred Queen Louise herself. The climax of the ballet came when the Four Cardinal Virtues appealed to the gods to defeat Circe's malign powers and Jupiter responded by transferring the sorceress's magic to the French royal family.
The costumes worn by dancers of such spectacles as the Ballet Comique de la Reine didn't resemble tutus in the slightest. Instead, they were fashioned from brocades and other heavy materials, richly embroidered, and ornamented. The dancers also wore their own shoes on stage. As one might expect, these kinds of costumes greatly restricted the movements of the dancers.
Ballet became an increasingly popular form of entertainment after this beginning. However because of its association with the French royal class, its popularity was temporarily eclipsed around the time of the French Revolution. The French Revolution also brought a significant change to dancewear itself inspiring simple, lighter clothing that permitted a far greater range of movement. It was around this time that heeled shoes gave way to slippers, skirts were shortened to ankle length and ballet tights made their first appearance.
Still, it wasn't until 1832 that the familiar layers of ethereal tulle made their first formal appearance on a ballerina named Marie Taglioni who was dancing the lead role in La Sylphides, a ballet her father, the famous Italian choreographer Filippo Taglioni, created just to showcase her talents. Taglioni was so proud of her excellent pointe work that she shortened her skirt to show it off - and so the tutu was born.
Taglioni's tutu was of a style that has come to be known as the Romantic tutu, a dreamy confection of three to five layers of soft, floaty tulle with a high waisted skirt that ended just at the calf. Other familiar tutu styles include the tiered, graduated net costume with top skirts of chiffon and organdy known as the pancake tutu; the fitted bodice and short, stiff, bell-shaped skirt known as the classical tutu; and the short, loose tulle skirt known as the powder-puff tutu that was invented by George Balanchine's designer, Karinska.