ABSTRACT
Drawing on theories of celebrity culture, dress studies, and theatre history, this chapter examines the influence of star performers on the changing function of costumes in the second half of the nineteenth century. Through a close reading of two star performers’ costumes when enacting dangerous female characters – Marietta Piccolomini as Violetta Valèry (1855) and Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (1888) – I argue that actresses used stage garments to create and balance two different kinds of fictions. Each of these performers expanded the role of costume as a tool for creating a fictional character, conveying information about the character’s interiority rather than the actress’s status or taste; in a parallel way, Piccolomini and Terry extended this expressive function of stage garments to shape perceptions of their private lives. Both of these transgressive roles – the courtesan Violetta and the murderous Lady M – could have contaminated audiences’ ideas about the actresses who portrayed them. Onstage and off, both performers used costume choices, disseminated through new mechanisms of celebrity, as a way of mediating between the real and the fictional and between the public and the private. Piccolomini used costume images to delineate her personal and professional lives, using her on- and offstage images to emphasize her aristocratic origins and demure behavior, as a counter to her risqué role. Terry did the opposite, using clever costume design to obscure her unconventional private life with a carefully constructed offstage persona. Using this as a halfway point between her “real” self and the characters she played allowed her to maintain the reputation for traditional female virtue that many of her roles suggested. Both women’s stage garments establish costume design as an important field upon which to trace the shifting relationship between fictional character, acting persona, and private life. The gap of several decades between them reveals changes in artists’ and audiences’ understanding of costume design, and shows the expanded power of new visual media to make celebrity images into reality.
