Costume
Costume is the distinctive style of dress of an individual or group that reflects their class, profession, nationality, activity or epoch. The term was traditionally used to describe typical appropriate clothing for certain activities, such as riding costume, swimming costume, dance costume, evening costume. Appropriate and acceptable costume is subject to changes in fashion and local cultural norms. "But sable is worn more in carriages, lined with real lace over ivory satin, worn over some smart costume suitable for an afternoon reception." A Woman's Letter from London. This general usage has been replaced by the terms "dress", "attire", "robes" or "wear" and usage of "costume" has become more limited to unusual or out-of-date clothing and to attire intended to evoke a change in identity, such as theatrical and mascot costumes. Before the advent of ready-to-wear apparel, clothing was made by hand; when made for commercial sale it was made, as late as the beginning of the 20th century, by "costumiers" women who ran businesses that met the demand for complicated or intimate female costume, including millinery and corsetry.
Costume comes from the same Italian word, inherited via French, which means custom. National costume or regional costume expresses local identity and emphasizes a culture's unique attributes, they are a source of national pride. Examples include Japanese kimono. In Bhutan there is a traditional national dress prescribed for men and women, including the monarchy; these have developed into a distinctive dress style. The dress worn by men is known as Gho, a robe worn up to knee-length and is fastened at the waist by a band called the Kera; the front part of the dress, formed like a pouch, in olden days was used to hold baskets of food and short dagger, but now it is used to keep cell phone and the betel nut called Doma. The dress worn by women consist of three pieces known as Kira and Wonju; the long dress which extends up to the ankle is Kira. The jacket worn above this is Tego, provided with Wonju, the inner jacket. However, while visiting the Dzong or monastery a long scarf or stoll, called Kabney is worn by men across the shoulder, in colours appropriate to their ranks.
Women wear scarfs or stolls called Rachus, made of raw silk with embroidery, over their shoulder but not indicative of their rank. "Costume" refers to a particular style of clothing worn to portray the wearer as a character or type of character at a social event in a theatrical performance on the stage or in film or television. In combination with other aspects of stagecraft, theatrical costumes can help actors portray characters' and their contexts as well as communicate information about the historical period/era, geographic location and time of day, season or weather of the theatrical performance; some stylized theatrical costumes, such as Harlequin and Pantaloon in the Commedia dell'arte, exaggerate an aspect of a character. A costume technician is a term used for a person that alters the costumes; the costume technician is responsible for taking the two dimensional sketch and translating it to create a garment that resembles the designer's rendering. It is important for a technician to keep the ideas of the designer in mind when building the garment.
Draping is the art of manipulating the fabric using pins and hand stitching to create structure on a body. This is done on a dress form to get the adequate shape for the performer. Cutting is the act of laying out fabric on a flat surface, using scissors to cut and follow along a pattern; these pieces are put together to create a final costume. It is easier to visualize the finished product It is hard to keep the fabric symmetric You are able to drape in your fashion fabric rather than making a muslin mockup Draping makes it difficult to replicate for multiple people There are no needs for patterns It can be hard to keep the grain of the fabric straight There is less waste when using the specific fabric from the start You are able to create your own pattern to fit a certain size You may need instructions to piece the fabric together It is easier to control the grain of the fabric as well as symmetry There is more ability to create many of the same garment The measurements can be accurate It takes time to see he final product The job of a costume technician is to construct and pattern the costumes for the play or performance.
The wardrobe supervisor oversees the wardrobe run of the show from backstage. They are responsible for maintaining the good condition of the costumes. Millinery known as hatmaking is the manufacturing of hats and headwear; the wearing of costumes is an important part of holidays developed from religious festivals such as Mardi Gras, Halloween. Mardi Gras costumes take the form of jesters and other fantasy characters. In modern times. Christmas costumes portray characters such as Santa Claus. In Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States the American version of a Santa suit and beard is popular. Easter costumes are associated with the Easter Bunny or other animal costumes. In Judaism, a common practice is to dress up on Purim. During this holiday, Jews celebrate the change of their destiny, they were delivered from being the victims of an evil decree against them and were instead allowed by the King to destroy their enemies. A quote from the Book of Esther, which
Renaissance
The Renaissance is a period in European history, covering the span between the 14th and 17th centuries and marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. The traditional view focuses more on the early modern aspects of the Renaissance and argues that it was a break from the past, but many historians today focus more on its medieval aspects and argue that it was an extension of the middle ages; the intellectual basis of the Renaissance was its version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman Humanitas and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of Protagoras, who said that "Man is the measure of all things." This new thinking became manifest in art, politics and literature. Early examples were the development of perspective in oil painting and the recycled knowledge of how to make concrete. Although the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the 15th century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniformly experienced across Europe: the first traces appear in Italy as early as the late 13th century, in particular with the writings of Dante and the paintings of Giotto.
As a cultural movement, the Renaissance encompassed innovative flowering of Latin and vernacular literatures, beginning with the 14th-century resurgence of learning based on classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch. In politics, the Renaissance contributed to the development of the customs and conventions of diplomacy, in science to an increased reliance on observation and inductive reasoning. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, as well as social and political upheaval, it is best known for its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term "Renaissance man"; the Renaissance began in the 14th century in Italy. Various theories have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors including the social and civic peculiarities of Florence at the time: its political structure, the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici, the migration of Greek scholars and texts to Italy following the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks.
Other major centres were northern Italian city-states such as Venice, Milan and Rome during the Renaissance Papacy. The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and, in line with general scepticism of discrete periodizations, there has been much debate among historians reacting to the 19th-century glorification of the "Renaissance" and individual culture heroes as "Renaissance men", questioning the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and as a historical delineation; the art historian Erwin Panofsky observed of this resistance to the concept of "Renaissance": It is no accident that the factuality of the Italian Renaissance has been most vigorously questioned by those who are not obliged to take a professional interest in the aesthetic aspects of civilization – historians of economic and social developments and religious situations, most natural science – but only exceptionally by students of literature and hardly by historians of Art. Some observers have called into question whether the Renaissance was a cultural "advance" from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for classical antiquity, while social and economic historians of the longue durée, have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras, which are linked, as Panofsky observed, "by a thousand ties".
The word Renaissance meaning "Rebirth", first appeared in English in the 1830s. The word occurs in Jules Michelet's 1855 work, Histoire de France; the word Renaissance has been extended to other historical and cultural movements, such as the Carolingian Renaissance and the Renaissance of the 12th century. The Renaissance was a cultural movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life in the early modern period. Beginning in Italy, spreading to the rest of Europe by the 16th century, its influence was felt in literature, art, politics, science and other aspects of intellectual inquiry. Renaissance scholars employed the humanist method in study, searched for realism and human emotion in art. Renaissance humanists such as Poggio Bracciolini sought out in Europe's monastic libraries the Latin literary and oratorical texts of Antiquity, while the Fall of Constantinople generated a wave of émigré Greek scholars bringing precious manuscripts in ancient Greek, many of which had fallen into obscurity in the West.
It is in their new focus on literary and historical texts that Renaissance scholars differed so markedly from the medieval scholars of the Renaissance of the 12th century, who had focused on studying Greek and Arabic works of natural sciences and mathematics, rather than on such cultural texts. In the revival of neo-Platonism Renaissance humanists did not reject Christianity. However, a subtle shift took place in the way that intellectuals approached religion, reflected in many other areas of cultural life. In addition, many Greek Christian works, including the Greek New Testament, were brought back from Byzantium to Western Europe and engaged Western scholars for the first time since late antiquity; this new engagement with Greek Christian works, the return to the original Greek of the Ne
Caravaggio
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was an Italian painter active in Rome, Naples and Sicily from the early 1590s to 1610. His paintings combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, which had a formative influence on Baroque painting. Caravaggio employed close physical observation with a dramatic use of chiaroscuro that came to be known as tenebrism, he made the technique a dominant stylistic element, darkening shadows and transfixing subjects in bright shafts of light. Caravaggio vividly expressed crucial moments and scenes featuring violent struggles and death, he worked with live models, preferring to forgo drawings and work directly onto the canvas. His influence on the new Baroque style that emerged from Mannerism was profound, it can be seen directly or indirectly in the work of Peter Paul Rubens, Jusepe de Ribera, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Rembrandt, artists in the following generation under his influence were called the "Caravaggisti" or "Caravagesques", as well as tenebrists or tenebrosi.
Caravaggio trained as a painter in Milan before moving in his twenties to Rome. He developed a considerable name as an artist, as a violent and provocative man. A brawl forced him to flee to Naples. There he again established himself as one of the most prominent Italian painters of his generation, he traveled in 1607 to Malta and on to Sicily, pursued a papal pardon for his sentence. In 1609 he returned to Naples. Questions about his mental state arose from his bizarre behavior, he died in 1610 under uncertain circumstances while on his way from Naples to Rome. Reports stated that he died of a fever, but suggestions have been made that he was murdered or that he died of lead poisoning. Caravaggio's innovations inspired Baroque painting, but the Baroque incorporated the drama of his chiaroscuro without the psychological realism; the style evolved and fashions changed, Caravaggio fell out of favor. In the 20th century interest in his work revived, his importance to the development of Western art was reevaluated.
The 20th-century art historian André Berne-Joffroy stated, "What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite modern painting." Caravaggio was born in Milan, where his father, was a household administrator and architect-decorator to the Marchese of Caravaggio, a town not far from the city of Bergamo. In 1576 the family moved to Caravaggio to escape a plague that ravaged Milan, Caravaggio's father and grandfather both died there on the same day in 1577, it is assumed that the artist grew up in Caravaggio, but his family kept up connections with the Sforzas and with the powerful Colonna family, who were allied by marriage with the Sforzas and destined to play a major role in Caravaggio's life. Caravaggio's mother died in 1584, the same year he began his four-year apprenticeship to the Milanese painter Simone Peterzano, described in the contract of apprenticeship as a pupil of Titian. Caravaggio appears to have stayed in the Milan-Caravaggio area after his apprenticeship ended, but it is possible that he visited Venice and saw the works of Giorgione, whom Federico Zuccari accused him of imitating, Titian.
He would have become familiar with the art treasures of Milan, including Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, with the regional Lombard art, a style that valued simplicity and attention to naturalistic detail and was closer to the naturalism of Germany than to the stylised formality and grandeur of Roman Mannerism. Following his initial training under Simone Peterzano, in 1592 Caravaggio left Milan for Rome, in flight after "certain quarrels" and the wounding of a police officer; the young artist arrived in Rome "naked and needy... without fixed address and without provision... short of money." During this period he stayed with the miserly Pandolfo Pucci, known as "monnsignor Insalata". A few months he was performing hack-work for the successful Giuseppe Cesari, Pope Clement VIII's favourite artist, "painting flowers and fruit" in his factory-like workshop. In Rome there was demand for paintings to fill the many huge new churches and palazzos being built at the time, it was a period when the Church was searching for a stylistic alternative to Mannerism in religious art, tasked to counter the threat of Protestantism.
Caravaggio's innovation was a radical naturalism that combined close physical observation with a dramatic theatrical, use of chiaroscuro that came to be known as tenebrism. Known works from this period include a small Boy Peeling a Fruit, a Boy with a Basket of Fruit, the Young Sick Bacchus a self-portrait done during convalescence from a serious illness that ended his employment with Cesari. All three demonstrate the physical particularity for which Caravaggio was to become renowned: the fruit-basket-boy's produce has been analysed by a professor of horticulture, able to identify individual cultivars right down to "... a large fig leaf with a prominent fungal scorch lesion resembling anthracnose."Caravaggio left Cesari, determined to make his own way after a heated argument. At this point he forged some important friendships, with the painter Prospero Orsi, the architect Onorio Longhi, the sixteen-year-old Sicilian artist Mario Minniti. Orsi
Rococo
Rococo, less roccoco, or "Late Baroque", is a ornamental and theatrical style of decoration which combines asymmetry, scrolling curves, gilding and pastel colors, sculpted molding, trompe l'oeil frescoes to create the illusions of surprise and drama. It first appeared in France and Italy in the 1730s and spread to Central Europe in the 1750s and 1760s, it is described as the final expression of the Baroque movement. The Rococo style began in France in the first part of the 18th century in the reign of Louis XV as a reaction against the more formal and geometric Style Louis XIV, it was known as the style rocaille style. It soon spread to other parts of Europe northern Italy, Austria, other parts of Germany, Russia, it came to influence the other arts sculpture, furniture and glassware, painting and theatre. The word rococo was first used as a humorous variation of the word rocaille. Rocaille was a method of decoration, using pebbles and cement, used to decorate grottoes and fountains since the Renaissance.
In the late 17th and early 18th century rocaille became the term for a kind of decorative motif or ornament that appeared in the late Style Louis XIV, in the form of a seashell interlaced with acanthus leaves. In 1736 the designer and jeweler Jean Mondon published the Premier Livre de forme rocquaille et cartel, a collection of designs for ornaments of furniture and interior decoration, it was the first appearance in print of the term "rocaille" to designate the style. The carved or molded seashell motif was combined with palm leaves or twisting vines to decorate doorways, wall panels and other architectural elements; the term rococo was first used in print in 1825 to describe decoration, "out of style and old-fashioned." It was used in 1828 for decoration "which belonged to the style of the 18th century, overloaded with twisting ornaments." In 1829 the author Stendhal described rococo as "the rocaille style of the 18th century."In the 19th century, the term was used to describe architecture or music, excessively ornamental.
Since the mid-19th century, the term has been accepted by art historians. While there is still some debate about the historical significance of the style, Rococo is now considered as a distinct period in the development of European art. Rococo features exuberant decoration, with an abundance of curves, counter-curves and elements modeled on nature; the exteriors of Rococo buildings are simple, while the interiors are dominated by their ornament. The style was theatrical, designed to impress and awe at first sight. Floor plans of churches were complex, featuring interlocking ovals; the style integrated painting, molded stucco, wood carving, quadratura, or illusionist ceiling paintings, which were designed to give the impression that those entering the room were looking up at the sky, where cherubs and other figures were gazing down at them. Materials used painted or left white; the intent was to create an impression of surprise and wonder on first view. Rococo was influenced by chinoiserie and was sometimes in association with Chinese figures and pagodas.
The Rocaille style, or French Rococo, appeared in Paris during the reign of Louis XV, flourished between about 1723 and 1759. The style was used in salons, a new style of room designed to impress and entertain guests; the most prominent example was the salon of the Princess in Hôtel de Soubise in Paris, designed by Germain Boffrand and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The characteristics of French Rococo included exceptional artistry in the complex frames made for mirrors and paintings, which sculpted in plaster and gilded; the furniture featured sinuous curves and vegetal designs. The leading furniture designers and craftsmen in the style included Juste-Aurele Meissonier, Charles Cressent, Nicolas Pineau; the Rocaille style lasted in France until the mid-18th century, while it became more curving and vegetal, it never achieved the extravagant exuberance of the Rococo in Bavaria and Italy. The discoveries of Roman antiquities beginning in 1738 at Herculanum and at Pompeii in 1748 turned French architecture in the direction of the more symmetrical and less flamboyant neo-classicism.
Artists in Italy Venice produced an exuberant rococo style. Venetian commodes imitated the curving lines and carved ornament of the French rocaille, but with a particular Venetian variation. Notable decorative painters included Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, who painted ceilings and murals of both churches and palazzos, Giovanni Battista Crosato who painted the ballroom ceiling of the Ca Rezzonico in the quadraturo manner, giving the illusion of three dimensions. Tiepelo travelled to Germany with his son during 1752–1754, decorating the ceilings of the Würzburg Residence, one of the major landmarks of the Bavarian rococo. An earlier celebrated Venetian painter was Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, who painted several notable church ceilings; the Venetian Rococo featured exceptional glassware Murano glass, ofte
Peasant
A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or farmer one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, peasants were divided into three classes according to their personal status: slave and free tenant. Peasants either hold title to land in fee simple, or hold land by any of several forms of land tenure, among them socage, quit-rent and copyhold; the word peasantry is used in a non-pejorative sense as a collective noun for the rural population in the poor and under-developed countries of the world. The word "peasant" is derived from the 15th century French word païsant, meaning one from the pays, or countryside. Peasants made up the majority of the agricultural labour force in a pre-industrial society; the majority of the people in the Middle Ages were peasants. Though "peasant" is a word of loose application, once a market economy had taken root, the term peasant proprietors was used to describe the traditional rural population in countries where smallholders farmed much of the land.
More the word "peasant" is sometimes used to refer pejoratively to those considered to be "lower class" defined by poorer education and/or a lower income. The open field system of agriculture dominated most of northern Europe during medieval times and endured until the nineteenth century in many areas. Under this system, peasants lived on a manor presided over by a bishop of the church. Peasants paid labor services to the lord in exchange for their right to cultivate the land. Fallowed land, pastures and wasteland were held in common; the open field system required cooperation among the peasants of the manor. It was replaced by individual ownership and management of land; the relative position of peasants in Western Europe improved after the Black Death had reduced the population of medieval Europe in the mid-14th century: resulting in more land for the survivors and making labor more scarce. In the wake of this disruption to the established order centuries saw the invention of the printing press, the development of widespread literacy and the enormous social and intellectual changes of the Enlightenment.
The evolution of ideas in an environment of widespread literacy laid the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution, which enabled mechanically and chemically augmented agricultural production while increasing the demand for factory workers in cities, who became what Karl Marx called the proletariat. The trend toward individual ownership of land, typified in England by Enclosure, displaced many peasants from the land and compelled them unwillingly, to become urban factory-workers, who came to occupy the socio-economic stratum the preserve of the medieval peasants; this process happened in an pronounced and truncated way in Eastern Europe. Lacking any catalysts for change in the 14th century, Eastern European peasants continued upon the original medieval path until the 18th and 19th centuries. Serfdom was abolished in Russia in 1861, while many peasants would remain in areas where their family had farmed for generations, the changes did allow for the buying and selling of lands traditionally held by peasants, for landless ex-peasants to move to the cities.
Before emancipation in 1861, serfdom was on the wane in Russia. The proportion of serfs within the empire had decreased "from 45-50 percent at the end of the eighteenth century, to 37.7 percent in 1858." In Germany, peasants continued to center their lives in the village well into the 19th century. They belonged to a corporate body and helped to manage the community resources and to monitor community life. In the East they had the status of serfs bound permanently to parcels of land. A peasant is called a "Bauer" in German and "Bur" in Low German. In most of Germany, farming was handled by tenant farmers who paid rents and obligatory services to the landlord—typically a nobleman. Peasant leaders supervised the fields and ditches and grazing rights, maintained public order and morals, supported a village court which handled minor offenses. Inside the family the patriarch made all the decisions, tried to arrange advantageous marriages for his children. Much of the villages' communal life centered on holy days.
In Prussia, the peasants drew lots to choose conscripts required by the army. The noblemen handled external relationships and politics for the villages under their control, were not involved in daily activities or decisions. Information about the complexities of the French Revolution the fast-changing scene in Paris, reached isolated areas through both official announcements and long-established oral networks. Peasants responded differently to different sources of information; the limits on political knowledge in these areas depended more on how much peasants chose to know than on bad roads or illiteracy. Historian Jill Maciak concludes that peasants "were neither subservient, nor ignorant."In his seminal book Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1880–1914, historian Eugen Weber traced the modernization of French villages and argued that rural France went from backward and isolated to modern and possessing a sense of French nationhood during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
He emphasized the roles of railroads, republican schools, universal military conscription. He based his findings on school records, migration patterns, military-service documents and economic trends. Weber argued that until 1900 or so a sense of French nationhood
Domestic worker
A domestic worker, domestic helper, domestic servant, manservant or menial, is a person who works within the employer's household. Domestic helpers perform a variety of household services for an individual or a family, from providing care for children and elderly dependents to housekeeping, including cleaning and household maintenance. Other responsibilities may include cooking and ironing, shopping for food and other household errands; such work has always needed to be done but before the Industrial Revolution and the advent of labour saving devices, it was physically much harder. Some domestic helpers live within their employer's household. In some cases, the contribution and skill of servants whose work encompassed complex management tasks in large households have been valued. However, for the most part, domestic work, while necessary, is undervalued. Although legislation protecting domestic workers is in place in many countries, it is not extensively enforced. In many jurisdictions, domestic work is poorly regulated and domestic workers are subject to serious abuses, including slavery.
Servant is an older English word for "domestic worker", though not all servants worked inside the home. Domestic service, or the employment of people for wages in their employer's residence, was sometimes called "service" and has been part of a hierarchical system. In Britain a developed system of domestic service peaked towards the close of the Victorian era reaching its most complicated and rigidly structured state during the Edwardian period, which reflected the limited social mobility before World War I; the United Kingdom's Master and Servant Act 1823 was the first of its kind. The Act influenced the creation of domestic service laws in other nations, although legislation tended to favour employers. However, before the passing of such Acts servants, workers in general, had no protection in law; the only real advantage that domestic service provided was the provision of meals and sometimes clothes, in addition to a modest wage. Service was an apprentice system with room for advancement through the ranks.
The conditions faced by domestic workers have varied throughout history and in the contemporary world. In the course of twentieth-century movements for labour rights, women's rights and immigrant rights, the conditions faced by domestic workers and the problems specific to their class of employment have come to the fore. In 2011, the International Labour Organization adopted the Convention Concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers. At its 301st Session, the International Labour Organization Governing Body agreed to place an item on decent work for domestic workers on the agenda of the 99th Session of the International Labour Conference with a view to the setting of labour standards. In July 2011, at the annual International Labour Conference, held by the ILO, conference delegates adopted the Convention on Domestic Workers by a vote of 396 to 16, with 63 abstentions; the Convention recognized domestic workers as workers with the same rights as other workers. On 26 April 2012, Uruguay was the first country to ratify the convention.
Many domestic workers are live-in domestics. Though they have their own quarters, their accommodations are not as comfortable as those reserved for the family members. In some cases, they sleep in the kitchen or small rooms, such as a box room, sometimes located in the basement or attic. Domestic workers may live in their own home, though more they are "live-in" domestics, meaning that they receive their room and board as part of their salaries. In some countries, because of the large gap between urban and rural incomes, the lack of employment opportunities in the countryside an ordinary middle class urban family can afford to employ a full-time live-in servant; the majority of domestic workers in China, Mexico and other populous developing countries, are people from the rural areas who are employed by urban families. Employers may require their domestic workers to wear a uniform, livery or other "domestic workers' clothes" when in their employers' residence; the uniform is simple, though aristocratic employers sometimes provided elaborate decorative liveries for use on formal occasions.
Female servants wore long, dark-coloured dresses or black skirts with white belts and white blouses, black shoes, male servants and butlers would wear something from a simple suit, or a white dress shirt with tie, knickers. In traditional portrayals, the attire of domestic workers was more formal and conservative than that of those whom they serve. For example, in films of the early 20th century, a butler might appear in a tailcoat, while male family members and guests appeared in lounge suits or sports jackets and trousers depending on the occasion. In portrayals, the employer and guests might wear casual slacks or jeans, while a male domestic worker wore a jacket and tie or a white dress shirt with black trousers, necktie or bowtie, maybe waistcoat, or a female domestic worker either a blouse and skirt or a uniform. On 30 March 2009, Peru adopted a law banning employers from requiring domestic workers to wear uniform at public places. However, it's not explained. Chile adopted a similar law in 2014 banning employers to require domestic workers to wear uniform at public places.
In the United States, slavery ended in 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau informed the former slaves now classified as fr
Page boy (wedding attendant)
A page boy is a young male attendant at a wedding or a cotillion. This type of wedding attendant is less common than it used to be, but it is still a way of including young relatives or the children of friends in a wedding. Pages are seen at British royal weddings, such as the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton in 2011. At cotillions, there may be many pages, for effect. Traditionally, page boys carry the bride's train if the bride is wearing a dress with a long train; because of the difficulty of managing a train, page boys are no younger than age seven, with older boys being preferred for more complicated duties. In a formal wedding, the ring bearer is a special page who carries the wedding rings for the bridal party; this is always symbolic, with the ring bearer carrying a wedding ring cushion on which imitation rings are sewn, while the real wedding bands are kept in the safekeeping of the best man. If the real rings are used, they are tacked on with thread to prevent their accidental loss.
Ring bearers are young relatives or children of friends and are in the same age range as flower girls, to say that they are no younger than about five nor older than ten, although the age range is up to the marrying couple. If the couple have had any children prior to marriage their child may serve as ring bearer. A coin bearer is similar to a ring bearer; the coin bearer is a young boy who marches up the wedding aisle to bring the wedding coins, a tradition in Spanish-speaking countries. The wedding coins are more known as wedding arrhae, the coins are presented to the celebrant for a blessing
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