neadods | Photographs of competitions past

skywardprodigal is whacking her head against a wall about a "Why is fandom so white" post, wherein the OP basically said that, based on a single black fan, the answer was that "black people have something better to do than go to conventions."

Gonna be a hell of a shock to the ones I know, I tell ya.

When I started going to conventions, I was one of the competition costumers. And there, everyone knew Toni, Denise, and Jeanette. They were hard to miss in the costuming world, and I'm not talking skin color - each woman was a competitor, a panelist, a judge, and Toni and Denise between them built their branch of the International Costumer's Guild into one of the rowdier and more infamous chapters, while Jeanette has been a quieter but even longer-running officer in our local chapter - not to mention one of the core members of my Shore Leave Masq. team. For people who had "better things to do than go to conventions," they were and are movers and shakers in the costuming world.

But the issue of "costuming for color" did come up. Denise announced she was tired of "costuming white*" and went historical or mythological. (Same guy. Consider it revenge for the shears.)

But Jeanette... Jeanette said she didn't want to costume "white" and she didn't want to be a slave; she wanted to do a historical that showed her background.

And so she and Jennie came up with a costume that became costuming legend.

As the presentation begins, it tells about a woman whose father was an envoy from the court of Henry VIII. The lights came up behind her, showing the outline of the perfect Tudor dress as the narration went on about how she was waiting to go to that wonderful world she'd been told about, and how she'd prepared herself from the materials at hand in her mother's home so far away.

And then the main lights snapped on and revealed African Tudor.

It was, and I mean this quite literally, awesome.

*I suddenly realize that this photo probably looks alarming out of context. It was a hilarious presentation where Toni read the bodice-ripping portion of a romance, while onstage the hero tried futilely to actually get through the historically accurate clothing. So while the narration had him about 3 seconds away from being a father, onstage he didn't even get through the first layer... until he chased her offstage with the shears.