Vintage Mardi Gras Parades

Featuring parades from the 1920s through the 1970s, this montage was originally featured in The Historic New Orleans Collection’s award-winning 2022 exhibition Making Mardi Gras.

Parades are gifts from Mardi Gras krewes to the public, with themes chosen to entertain and educate spectators. Because parades are nonprofit endeavors, krewes are allowed to depict copyrighted images in their float designs. So long as there’s no advertising, no subject is off limits. Drawn from folklore, global history, literature, and popular culture, parade themes reflect the interests and ideas of the krewe leaders who choose them.

Each krewe works with a designer to create the rolling theater that is their parade. The designer draws from historical research, contemporary artistic trends, and their own imagination to create the blueprints for anywhere from 14 to 45 floats.

💜 💚 💛 More MARDI GRAS from THNOC 💜 💚 💛

🎥 Behind-the-Scenes at the Rex Den:    • Made by Hand: The History and Artistry of ...  

🙋 How to Catch Beads during Mardi Gras (no, not that way):
https://www.hnoc.org/publications/fir...

👽 Looking at the Obscure—and Sometimes Disturbing—Lore from the “Golden Age of Carnival”: https://www.hnoc.org/publications/fir...


📚 🔍 FURTHER READING and RESOURCES

🐣 NOLA Newbie? New Orleans History Starter Pack: https://www.hnoc.org/publications/fir...

© The Historic New Orleans Collection 2023

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