About the Collection

This website is a place for the burlesque community to share, collect and explore fabulous costumes, acts and stories. It has been co-created by the Fabulous Femininities project team alongside our partners and advisors.

yellow feathers
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Fabulous Femininities is a three-year research project seeking to understand the way that fabulousness and femininity are performed by UK burlesque performers and club-goers via costume. The immersive and ethnographic study will focus on a range of club events and the experiences and practices of participants (performers, club-goers, costumiers etc) in order to document, understand and theorise the transformative threshold between the everyday self and the extravagant spectacle.

The project is led by University of Leeds in partnership with Northumbria University, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).