A photo of me participating in the Mardi Gras ball tradition as a maid
Author: Celeste Falgoust | Major: Apparel Merchandising and Product Development | Semester: Spring 2024
It’s my senior year of high school in South Louisiana, and I’m finally embarking on an experience I’ve anticipated my whole life—becoming a Mardi Gras maid. As I sit in the dressmaker’s workroom for my first fitting, I’m mesmerized by the fabrics, sequins, and crystals surrounding me. I can hardly believe I’m about to receive a custom-made Mardi Gras costume.
When Mardi Gras season arrives, the other eight maids, the queen, and I embark on a journey filled with announcement parties, brunches, teas, fittings, and dance practices, all leading up to our ball on Lundi Gras, or Fat Monday, the day before Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday. When the ball finally arrives, I feel as though I’m coming of age, forging a deeper connection to my South Louisiana culture.
In 2020, I moved to Arkansas to attend college. During my sophomore year, I began brainstorming research topics and asked myself what was meaningful to me. Moving to Arkansas made me appreciate the cultural significance of Mardi Gras even more, highlighting how unique this long-standing tradition is. I noticed a gap in Mardi Gras research and, after exploring other research on cultural costumes, I saw that in other cultures, identity is directly influenced by cultural attire. This realization led me to focus my research on how Mardi Gras costumes influence the identity of maids and queens. Choosing my mentor, Mrs. Stephanie Hubert, happened naturally. She was a professor I worked well with and had already shown interest in Mardi Gras costumes.
In my research, I wanted to know what the Mardi Gras costuming experience meant to others and how it shaped their identities, much like it shaped mine. I conducted ten interviews, each lasting one to two hours, with maids, debutantes, queens, and dressmakers. From these conversations, I learned the beauty of a story. Their words were my data, and it felt special to document something so rarely researched. This was my first time tackling a project as extensive as a thesis, and initially, I doubted my ability to handle it. However, my deep interest in the topic kept me going through many hours of research.
After manually transcribing the interviews, I separated all of their quotes into complete thoughts in an Excel sheet, assigning each complete thought three themes, such as personal identity, family connection, or social class, that best represented the data set. From there, I was able to quantify the themes and understand which thoughts were most prevalent among the women.
Because my research was qualitative, it was very time-consuming. Pushing through the mundane parts like transcribing and coding was difficult, but my goal to properly document the history and culture kept me motivated. I had a team of two other members, Mr. Powell and Dr. Garrison, who helped me navigate the research process and brainstorm ways to analyze the large data set.
Last Spring the Honors College Grant and SURF Grant enabled me to spend more time on my research and act as a part-time job for one semester. Without this funding, I wouldn’t have had enough time to thoroughly code and analyze every sentence from the women’s interviews. Last April I successfully defended my thesis and presented my research at two symposiums, winning the People’s Choice Award at the Bumper’s College Symposium. Most importantly, this project contributed to the narrative of thousands of women who have participated in this tradition and illuminated the countless hours of planning and preparation that keep Mardi Gras alive. Through my research, I learned that Mardi Gras is as integral to Louisiana’s identity as it is to the individual women I studied. I don’t know what Louisiana would be without this tradition, and I feel fortunate to have contributed to documenting it.