The Polka dot is a pattern consisting of an array of large filled circles of the same size. [1]
Polka dots are commonly seen on children's clothing, toys, furniture, ceramics, and Central European folk art, but they appear in a wide array of contexts. The pattern rarely appears in formal contexts and is generally confined to more playful attire such as bathing suits and lingerie.
The term likely originated because of the popularity of the polka dance around the same time the pattern became fashionable, just as many other products and fashions of the era also adopted the "polka" name. [1]
In 1962, DC Comics introduced Polka-Dot Man with irregularly-sized and differently coloured dots. Polka-Dot Man made his first theatrical debut in the film The Suicide Squad directed by James Gunn. He was played by actor David Dastmalchian.
Since 1975, a red-on-white Polka-dotted jersey has been awarded to the leader in the Mountain stages of the annual Tour de France cycling tournament. [2]
Some people associate polka dots with Venezuelan fashion designer Carolina Herrera, who used polka dots on most of her dresses during the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as on the boxes of perfume Carolina Herrera, Herrera For Men, Aquaflore and Flore. [3]
Much of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama's work features a polka dot motif, [4] [5] and the cryptocurrency Polkadot takes its name after the design. [6]
The polka dot also appears in popular music. "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" is a novelty song telling the story of a shy girl in a very revealing bathing suit who stays immersed in the ocean water to hide from view. It was written by Paul Vance and Lee Pockriss and first released in June 1960 by Brian Hyland. Before that, however, "Polka Dots and Moonbeams" was a popular song with music by Jimmy Van Heusen and lyrics by Johnny Burke, published in 1940. It was Frank Sinatra's first hit, recorded with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. The song is one of the top 100 most-frequently recorded jazz standards [7] with arrangements by Gil Evans and others and notable recordings by Lester Young, Sarah Vaughn and many others.
The 1943 Twentieth Century Fox Technicolor musical film The Gang's All Here , directed by Busby Berkeley, featured a large production number "The Polka-Dot Polka". [8] The song was written by Harry Warren and Leo Robin, referencing the 19th Century Polka Dot craze in the lyrics, and sung by Alice Faye with the Busby Berkeley dancers. [9]
Berkeley William Enos, known professionally as Busby Berkeley, was an American film director and musical choreographer. Berkeley devised elaborate musical production numbers that often involved complex geometric patterns. Berkeley's works used large numbers of showgirls and props as fantasy elements in kaleidoscopic on-screen performances.
Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, and is also active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, the world's top-selling female artist, and the world's most successful living artist. Her work influenced that of her contemporaries, including Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.
Hip-hop fashion refers to various styles of dress that originated from Urban Black America and inner city youth in cities like New York City, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. Being a major part of hip hop culture, it further developed in other cities across the United States, with each contributing different elements to the overall style that is now recognized worldwide.
John Francis Burke was an American lyricist, successful and prolific between the 1920s and 1950s. His work is considered part of the Great American Songbook.
The folkloric traditional music of Paraguay is the Paraguayan polka and the Guarania. The Paraguayan polka comes from polka of Czech origin; that was danced for the first time in Asunción, on November 27, 1858. The guarania was created by the Paraguayan musician José Asunción Flores, in January 1925, after experiencing different arrangements with the old Paraguayan musical theme "Ma'erãpa reikuaase". Paraguay also has classical music and popular music consisting of rock and jazz music. The folk music uses a range of different instruments some of which include the Spanish guitar and the European harp.
The 20th century saw the rise and fall of many subcultures.
Música criolla, creole music or canción criolla is a varied genre of Peruvian music that exhibits influences from European, African and Andean music. The genre's name reflects the coastal culture of Peru, and the local evolution of the term criollo, a word originally denoting high-status people of full Spanish ancestry, into a more socially inclusive element of the nation.
Contradanza is the Spanish and Spanish-American version of the contradanse, which was an internationally popular style of music and dance in the 18th century, derived from the English country dance and adopted at the court of France. Contradanza was brought to America and there took on folkloric forms that still exist in Bolivia, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Panama and Ecuador.
"Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" is a novelty song telling the story of a shy girl wearing a revealing polka dot bikini at the beach. It was written by Paul Vance and Lee Pockriss and first released in June 1960 by Brian Hyland, with an orchestra conducted by John Dixon. The Hyland version reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, selling a million copies in the US, and was a worldwide hit. The song has been adapted into French as "Itsy bitsy petit bikini" and into German as "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Honolulu-Strand-Bikini", reaching number one on national charts in both languages. Several versions of the song have proved successful in various European countries. In 1990 a version by British pop band Bombalurina, titled "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini", reached number one on the UK Singles Chart and in Ireland.
The Gang's All Here is a 1943 American Twentieth Century Fox Technicolor musical film starring Alice Faye, Carmen Miranda and James Ellison. The film, directed and choreographed by Busby Berkeley, is known for its use of musical numbers with fruit hats. Included among the 10 highest-grossing films of that year, it was at that time Fox's most expensive production.
Western fashion in the 1920s underwent a modernization. For women, fashion had continued to change away from the extravagant and restrictive styles of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, and towards looser clothing which revealed more of the arms and legs, that had begun at least a decade prior with the rising of hemlines to the ankle and the movement from the S-bend corset to the columnar silhouette of the 1910s. Men also began to wear less formal daily attire and athletic clothing or 'Sportswear' became a part of mainstream fashion for the first time.
Blue Skies is the third studio album by American jazz singer Cassandra Wilson. It was released on the JMT label in 1988 and features Wilson performing ten jazz standards accompanied by Mulgrew Miller on piano, Terri Lyne Carrington on drums, and Lonnie Plaxico on bass.
"Polka Dots and Moonbeams" is a popular song with music by Jimmy Van Heusen and lyrics by Johnny Burke, published in 1940. It was Frank Sinatra's first hit recorded with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. The song is one of the top 100 most-frequently recorded jazz standards with arrangements by Gil Evans and others and notable recordings by Bill Evans, Chet Baker, Blue Mitchell, Wes Montgomery, Sarah Vaughan, Bud Powell, Lester Young, Gerry Mulligan, Lou Donaldson, Dexter Gordon and many others American songwriter and guitarist John Denver also covered the song on his 1976 Spirit album. Bob Dylan covered this song in his 2016 album Fallen Angels.
A Dolly Varden, in this sense, is a woman's outfit fashionable from about 1869 to 1875 in Britain and the United States. It is named after a character in Charles Dickens, and the items of clothing referred to are usually a hat or dress.
Between 1938 and 1944, Glenn Miller and His Orchestra released 266 singles on the monaural ten-inch shellac 78 rpm format. Their studio output comprised a variety of musical styles inside of the Swing genre, including ballads, band chants, dance instrumentals, novelty tracks, songs adapted from motion pictures, and, as the Second World War approached, patriotic music.
Sings Standards is a compilation album by American jazz singer Cassandra Wilson, released in 2002.
The traje de flamenca or traje de gitana is the dress traditionally worn by women at Ferias (festivals) in Andalusia, Spain. There are two forms: one worn by dancers and the other worn as a day dress.
"Glass" is an improvisational piece composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Carsten Nicolai, known by his stage name as Alva Noto, for Yayoi Kusama's installation Dots Obsession—Alive, Seeking for Eternal Hope, which ran in September 2016 at Philip Johnson's Glass House. A film of the performance was uploaded to the Glass House's official Vimeo account and website on November 11, 2016, and an audio recording of the 37-minute composition was released as an album on Nicolai's label NOTON on February 16, 2018. "Glass" is an unconventional ambient piece that uses sounds from a keyboard, glass-made singing bowls, and digital processing of the House's glass walls. The composition consists of developing layers of sounds performed over a single drone. It was praised by many professional reviewers as a display of Sakamoto and Nicolai's growing artistry.
Morning Song is a live album by pianist George Cables recorded at Keystone Korner in 1980 and released on the HighNote label in 2008.
Rain or Shine is an album by pianist Jodie Christian. It was recorded during May 1991 and December 1993 at Riverside Studio in Chicago, and was released in 1994 by Delmark Records. On the album, Christian is joined by saxophonists Art Porter and Roscoe Mitchell, trombonist Paul McKee, bassist Larry Gray, drummers Ernie Adams, George Hughes, and Vincent Davis, and vocalist Francine Griffin.
On account of the popularity of the dance, polka was prefixed as a trade name to articles of all kinds (cf. quot. 1898 in 1); e.g. the polka curtain-band (for looping up curtains), polka-gauze, polka hat; {polka-dot}, a pattern consisting of dots of uniform size and arrangement; also fig., attrib. or as adj., and as v. trans.; hence polka-dotted adj.