The Glitzy Evolution of the Age-Old Irish Dance Dress

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When I hear the words “red velvet,” I don’t think of the dessert. I don’t think of the K-pop band of the same name, which I recently found out exists. I don’t even think about resurgent velvet tube dresses or the sublime burgundy tux Armie Hammer wore to the Oscars. No, the kind of red velvet on my mind is traditional and elegant and emblematic of a very particular time in my life: the 10-year span of my childhood when I was an Irish dancer.

A rich, red velvet was the primary material for my first-ever “solo dress,” the prized, one-of-a-kind costume with embroidered Celtic designs reserved for Irish dancers who have reached an advanced level of competition. It is an outward symbol of achievement, somewhat akin to earning a black belt in karate or a gold star in math class. But unlike a monochrome strip of fabric or a metallic sticker, no two solo dresses are alike. They are made to stand out. My red dress, previously owned by two other dancers before it came into my possession when I was 9 years old, featured thin, emerald-green embroidery that sauntered through white and gold Celtic loops on the form-fitting bodice and flared, paneled skirt. Those loops and lines, I was told, were taken from the Book of Kells, an ancient manuscript famous for its intricate designs. White satin cuffs at the end of the long sleeves and the mandarin collar were traditional touches, and a few dozen rhinestones glued to the velvet gave the dress a hint of sparkle. It may have been a used dress, but it was mine, and it was perfect.

For the unfamiliar, Irish dancing is a traditional dance form performed either alone or in groups, as a performance or as part of a competition. There are dances done in “soft shoes,” similar to ballet shoes that lace up the front, and in “hard shoes,” a tap shoe equivalent, all set to Irish music. The actual choreography is challenging: It takes real athleticism to move your feet that quickly, to leap that high, and to keep your upper body rigid the whole time.

I Irish danced competitively from ages 5 to 15, in the 1990s and 2000s. After the red solo costume, I went on to wear two others: another second-hand velvet one, this time cerulean and magenta, and then the crown jewel, a custom dress I helped design in iridescent fuchsia silk. I retired from Irish dancing, if we can agree to call it that, to pursue other interests that compete for one’s attention in high school — sports, friends, watching The O.C. — but I never really stopped thinking about it, even now in adulthood. And as much as I remember the dance numbers, the folksy music (which still, embarrassingly, makes me weepy with nostalgia), and the Shania Twain–fueled carpools, it’s the dresses I can’t seem to shake.

Photo provided by the author

There’s this inherent tension between Irish dancing’s Celtic origins and the modern pageantry it often embraces. The dresses are the epitome of that strain, representing an art form (or, depending on who you ask, a sport) that must evolve to stay relevant in the 21st century while still honoring its roots. Last fall, when I stopped by a regional championship competition called Oireachtas I used to compete in, I was shocked at how different the costumes I saw were from that first red velvet dress.

Some trends, like fluorescent colors, sequin appliqué, and geometric designs (not unlike the ornate costumes we see in figure skating), started to bubble up just as I was winding down my career in the early 2000s. But some of the dresses that are out there today are shocking to anyone who hasn’t been part of that world for the last decade. Technically, these new costumes are quite impressive. The embroidery is exquisite. The colors vivid. Some still nod to traditional Celtic designs, but many seem to have left them behind for more modern shapes. The skirts are shorter, the bodices tighter, and the crystals are pervasive. The wigs, stage makeup, and self-tanned legs elicit comparisons to beauty pageants, but Irish dancing is so much more than that. It’s grueling, physical work to make your body move with equal parts power and control. Had I been the frog in the slowly warming water, maybe I wouldn’t have been so shocked at what I had seen. But my dip back in after so many years away felt like a plunge into a rolling boil of glitter and neon. How did this happen, and when?

The earliest form of Irish dancing can be traced back to rituals practiced by the Druids, the educated class of the ancient Celts. But the precursor for the disciplined Irish step dancing we know today was born in 18th-century Ireland with the emergence of traveling dancing masters. These master teachers would hold lessons for villagers, instructing them in group dances they would perform together. The best dancers were called soloists, a tradition that remains today, hence the “solo” costume. The other dancers yielded the stage — often a door removed at its hinges and laid on the ground — while the soloist enjoyed the spotlight and dazzled the audience for a few measures. In 1893, as part of the Celtic Revival movement, the Gaelic League was established in Dublin to promote Irish culture, including traditional dancing and costumes. Dancing competitions, called feiseanna (the singular, feis, pronounced “fesh,” means festival in Gaelic), spread to other countries, eventually hopping over the Atlantic to the US, where Irish immigrants kept the practice alive.

But until the 1990s, people outside of Ireland didn’t think of Irish dancing as much more than a folk dance. In 1989, dancers from the Trinity Academy of Irish Dance, the Midwest-based school where I spent the majority of my 10 dancing years, appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson for St. Patrick’s Day. They performed on the show again in 1990 and 1991. Millions of viewers tuned into Johnny Carson each night, exposing a large swath of Americans to this new form of progressive Irish dancing with astounding athleticism and precision set to live Irish music. The Chicago Tribune called them the “Rockettes of Irish dancing” shortly after that first televised appearance in ’89, a harbinger, perhaps, of the glitz and glam that was to come.

What really lifted Irish dancing out of its cultural niche and into widespread recognition was Riverdance, the theatrical show starring Jean Butler and Michael Flatley that leapt and stomped its way across the world after it premiered during the intermission at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest. The show became a sensation, galvanizing a new generation of Irish dance enthusiasts. Suddenly Irish dancing was cool; it was sexy. After Riverdance, dance schools across the world saw a surge in signups, according to Natalie Howard, one of my former teachers at Trinity who’s now the school’s director.

I was part of that new wave, joining Trinity in 1995. I was obsessed with Riverdance and watched it endlessly on VHS at home, riveted by the elegance and poise of the softer numbers and thunderous power of the fiery ones. I saw it live twice and almost died of delight each time.

The evolution of the Irish dancing costume started around the same time. When I first joined, solo dresses had a larger, looser fit. Base fabrics were often wool or velvet with traditional Celtic embroidery and crocheted collars. Some sleeves, like on my red dress, had large cuffs at the wrist, ideal for stashing hairnets and bobby pins, necessary tools to keep our curls in place before wigs replaced our foam rollers and mousse. The bodice of the dress hit at the natural waist, with the paneled skirt flaring out from there and landing an inch or two above the knee. Primary colors and jewel tones were common.

School costumes, the uniform worn by all dancers in a particular dance school, maintained many of these design elements well into the 21st century. But solo costumes became more showy throughout the 1990s and 2000s, fueled in part by Riverdance and its even glitzier spinoff shows that continued to commercialize Irish dancing. The cuffs disappeared. Crocheted collars fell out of fashion in favor of mandarin collars, and then no collar at all. Hints of metallic emerged. The heavy velvet and wool gave way to lighter fabrics that were easier to dance in and less punishing in the summer heat. By the early aughts, skirt hems inched up, the waist dropped, and flashier colors debuted.

“Irish dancing solo costumes went through a very bad period in the early 2000s,” Howard, the director at Trinity, says. “There were feathers, animal prints. It was almost like the more gaudy you could make it, the better.” She remembers stagehands having to clear feathers off the stage after every few dancers at the world championships at one point.

Technology played a large role in the evolving aesthetic. Dress designs were drawn on tracing paper and sewed by hand until the late ’90s. Digitizing designs that worked in sync with larger embroidery machines opened up new design possibilities. “Once the machines got bigger, we were able to embroider more detail. That wasn’t possible by hand,” says Keith Marron, founder and head designer at the Belfast-based Rising Star Designs. “The evolution of design made it possible to do things a lot quicker, a lot more intricate, and create new designs.” He says he and his two other designers make about 15 dresses a week, with their 10 embroidery machines constantly running.

As designs became more intricate, another premium appliqué was introduced: Swarovski crystals. Lots of them. The added bling caused the already-high price tag for a solo dress to spike. These days, a new, custom solo dress made in Ireland or the UK will set you back somewhere between $1,200 and $2,500, or even more, depending on the size, fabrics, and number of crystals.

“The solo costumes have become couture,” Howard says. In the 2011 documentary Strictly Irish Dancing, Ryan McCormack, a master dancer who performed with Riverdance in the ’90s, said Irish dancing costumes are best compared to wedding dresses.

The actual embroidered designs went from traditional motifs from the Book of Kells and Irish folklore — think interlocking Celtic knots, crosses, swans, swords — to modern, geometric shapes. I’ve seen dresses emblazoned with the likeness of eagles, butterflies, stars, and a pattern with a striking resemblance to the Chick-fil-A logo. The pendulum would inevitably swing back again, as trends do in fashion at large, and classic Celtic patterns are once again in style, just a lot more blinged out, blindingly so. They say it’s to catch the judge’s eye, which hopefully shifts the focus to her feet and leads to better scores. Dancers often request a style based on what was worn by the previous year’s top competitors, as if the right splash of canary yellow here or sparkly tulle there will make her a champion, too.

When I was 13, I was lucky enough to design my own solo costume. I flipped through one binder full of Celtic designs and another with fabric swatches. Even as a kid, my style preferences leaned traditional, but I wasn’t fully immune to the new trends. I went with a streamlined silhouette: no collar, no cuffs. I chose iridescent fuchsia silk for the base, which gave off a blue tint as I moved across the floor. An orangey-copper lamé served as the secondary fabric. For the design, I picked a pattern from the Book of Kells with zigs and zags but a decidedly Celtic undertone. It was my teenage attempt at new-meets-old-school.

About six weeks later, poof! There was my dream dress, made by some Irish fairy godmother armed with my measurements and tastes and then shipped halfway across the world. Of course, I didn’t know about the embroidery machines, or that the dress was made piecemeal until the very end, when it was stitched together. I didn’t think about the specifics of the person who made it, even. I didn’t have to, because it felt like magic. And even knowing what I know now, all these years later, it still kind of does.