Costume plays an important part both in traditional fairy tales and in their adaptations in diverse media forms, especially in performing arts such as theatre, ballet, opera, and musical, but also in other media such as film, visual art, manga, theme parks, video games, and digital and social media. Clothes worn by characters in fairy tales function according to the internal narrative logic that constitutes and organizes the story-world, defining and transforming the wearers’ identities and social contexts. In this sense, fairy-tale clothes can be regarded as costume, defined as the kind of clothes that bear significance, within a staged, performed moment for an audience, ranging from traditional theatre to live art, through spoken, movement based, or sung performance. The ubiquitous persistence of fairy tales in popular cultures across the globe renders them a means to express social, cultural and psychological anxieties, evoking ethical dimensions of individual and collective struggles. As such, the way characters are embodied through their clothes bears significant narrative and performative potential in layering of meanings in performance making.
Equally, iconic fairy tale characters may float away from their narrative roles and be found to be expressing key themes in contemporary performance-based artistic practices. For example, Korean-born photographer Chan-Hyo Bae in his Existing in Costume series (2006-) casts himself in the roles of princesses in European fairy tales such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty by wearing authentic dresses worn by ruling-class women in eighteenth-century England, thereby foregrounding the physical and metaphorical tension between the male Asian body and those kinds of historical costumes which evidence the Eurocentric colonial norms still dominant in today’s globalized culture.
