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These costumes are all *very* similar…
Looks like Josephine may have worn it first (and topless) around 1927 in the Folies Bergere show “Un Vent de Folie”. George Barbier was most likely the costume designer.
But what do you think… are they recycling old costumes or is Josephine the trendsetter?
top: Josephine Baker by Walery, c1926. To promote her appearance in the Folies Bergere revue ‘Un Vent de Folie’ 1927
middle: Adelaide Hall by Walery, c1928. A publicity shot for the Paris run of “Blackbirds of 1928”
bottom: the chorus line at Club Prudhom , Washington DC by Scurlock Studio c1930
vintage vaudeville entertainers, chicago, c.1924
Original 1921 Shuffle Along cast. Noble Sissle is front, Adelaide Hall is directly behind him in the center. Shuffle Along is the first major successful African American musical with music and lyrics by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake. The musical premiered on Broadway in 1921 and launched the career of Adelaide Hall, Florence Mills and Josephine Baker.
Adelaide Hall jazz singer and entertainer, was born in Brooklyn, New York. A self-taught tap dancer, Hall began her long and eventful stage career in Broadway musical ‘Shuffle Along’ (1921).
She worked with Duke Ellington recorded one of the first scat vocal in jazz on Ellington’s ‘Creole Love Call’ in 1927. In 1928 she co-starred with Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson in Blackbirds of 1928, Broadway’s longest-running black-cast revue. In the show Adelaide introduced the classic song ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love’.
In the 1930s Hall headlined at New York’s famous Cotton Club and opened a nightclubs in Paris and London. She remained in London during WW2, between 1939 and 1945 she made over seventy recordings for Decca. After her nightclub was bombed during the London Blitz, Hall spent the remainder of the war broadcasting for the BBC and entertaining troops.
Adelaide’s 1947 performance in “Variety in Sepia” is the earliest surviving BBC television recording.
American-born jazz singer Adelaide Hall was named Britain’s highest paid female entertainer in 1941.
(publicity shot for Broadway revue “Blackbirds of 1928”)
