Metamorphosis Balls Revisited

March 2020, I wrote about Catherine the Great's “metamorphosis balls” in which the male and female attendees crossdressed under orders from the Russian empress herself. I researched the subject, but only found an article from Vogue magazine, which was sparked by the metamorphosis ball scene in the HBO series Catherine the Great (photo above).

Yesterday, an article came across the mojo wire via Atlas Obscura, “The Weekly Cross-Dressing Balls of 18th-Century Russian Royalty” by Sarah Durn, which goes into much greater detail than the Vogue article. 

The men would be required to wear the stockings, corsets, petticoats (up to five was customary), ruffled lace sleeves, hoop skirts, and elaborate sack back gowns that, on any other occasion, the women of court would’ve worn. The women, on the other hand, had to wear men’s embroidered waistcoats, full-skirted coats, breeches, white silk stockings, shoes with ostentatious buckles, a powdered wig, and an unwieldy sword.

In the metamorphosis balls, in which both men and women dressed as the opposite gender, there are two power shifts going on. First, Cole says, “there’s the power of somebody making you dress outside your gender.” Second, there’s the power play that “by doing it yourself, you are critiquing the power dynamics of gender and gendered dress.” By forcing their male courtiers to dress as women, Elizabeth and Catherine were reminding everyone who was boss. They made the rules. And even men had to follow them.

It is a fascinating read and I recommend it to all Femulate readers.

Wearing Madeleine.

Femulating Russian nobility in the 2019 Russian television series Ekaterina (Catherine).
You can view the femulation scene from Ekaterina on YouTube.

Metamorphosis Balls

Catherine the Great was a series that appeared on HBO last fall. I did not see it, but I heard that the first episode included scenes with crossdressed men. I planned to watch that episode, but one thing led to another and I forgot about it.

I recalled the HBO series yesterday when I came across an article about “metamorphosis balls” on Vogue.com.

“At the end of the first episode of HBO’s Catherine the Great, the empress Catherine (played by Helen Mirren—née Mironoff) holds a cross-dressing ball at the palace. Catherine, who we usually see in elaborate, heavily embroidered gowns (courtesy of costume designer Maja Meschede), is pictured instead wearing a tailcoat and breeches, taking advantage of the relative ease of movement to prance about the room and lead her courtiers in a traditional Russian dance.

“Meanwhile, her male advisors and military generals, who are usually seen in the episode trying to undermine Catherine’s authority, scuttle around looking uptight, toying uncomfortably with their undergarments and badly fitted wigs. Her power-hungry lover Grigory Orlov (Richard Roxburgh) is now more frustrated by his corset than by his diminishing presence at court: “This f**king thing—it pushes my tits up too far.”

“These gender-bending masquerades actually existed and were known at the time as metamorphosis balls. They were first popularized in Russia in the 1740s by Empress Elizabeth I, the daughter of Peter the Great and Catherine’s de facto mother-in-law, who purportedly held eight as part of her coronation celebrations and then every Tuesday throughout her reign. While balls involving cross-dressing were popular throughout Europe, they took on special meaning in Russia in the 18th century, an era dominated by female rulers looking to assert their authority through symbols of masculinity.”

(Click here to read the entire article.)

Wearing Shailene

Richard Roxburgh (right) attending a metamorphosis ball en femme in HBO’s Catherine the Great