Anyone interested in starting a post on old Irish dance photos? I've started a collection and just bid on this really cool one on eBay. Talk about "back in the day"! Bet those costumes didn't cost a fortune, either.

Another favorite.....

Those are so wonderful! What a great collection idea. Do you already own some? Can you post more? I love pics like this.

Thanks for sharing.

I LOVE old pictures like these!
I had a younger friend who used to dance at my dance school and they have this HUGE gorgeous house and they have pictures like this framed next to a large photo of my friend in her solo dress : ]

wow, I adore that second one...i would love to own one, where can you find them? what do you search under on ebay? can you find them anywhere else?

Here are some older pictures that I found a long time ago.

Great pictures, Luna! I'm just glad that as an adult dancer, my costuming is closer to these photos than to my daughter's photos where she looks more like Marie Antoinette with her Grainne wig and solo dress.

Here's another photo...more recent. It's an old postcard I found on eBay. Don't you just love the musician!

Woo-hoo, I just won the top photo on eBay. It's supposed to be printed on glossy paper, suitable for framing. This is my first real photo - the others in my collection are just digital, stored on my hard drive. I'll get the name of the eBay store/seller where I got the top picture.

Here's a link to another eBay listing, same photo, same seller:

cgi.ebay.com . . .

thanks heaps for the link!

Heres an odd one. I like everyone else's pictures. Their shoes look weird

I think I've seen that yellow-gold fabric on a solo dress somewhere

I love these pictures!
I only wonder: would the girl on the right on Luna's first picture know that she has a hole in her tights? Or are they baggy stockings? Never heard of sock glue than

they are most likely proper stockings, held up with suspenders.

^ I'm guessing that's from back in the day when tights were held up by garter belts. not the 'full coverage' that we have today

my question is, when did we switch from the ballet-flats to the ghillies?

criosa - when I was dancing in the 70s as a child, we wore black tights and a type of dance shoe that was very close to a ballet slipper with some additional small straps (like these girls). We also did not curl our hair, just kept it nice and neat (good for me with a page boy hair cut most of my child hood). I was very surprised when I returned to ID as an adult (post riverdance) and the hair and makeup and dresses and ghillies had really taken over! Now that I'm the mom of an ID, I don't mind it much.

these pictures are all so cool! i remember one ddn member's grandparents or parents collected old ID pictures and posted them a while back. i think they were from england. anyone else remember or am i just going crazy?

Does 1987 count as "reely old?" Here's a picture of the 4-hand team from the old Shamrock School in Denver with the Ceili Club Trophy. I'm second from left; second from right is Judy DeNapoli, ADCRG, who owns Celtic Steps now. Rachel Kermer-Jones, our teacher, is in the center. That same trophy is currently sitting on top of the water cooler at the Friendship Irish Dance Center; our school has won it in every odd-numbered year since we were established. Looking at the picture, the trophy was old 20 years ago; the figure on top was not the original even then.

Looking at the hair styles in Luna's pictures I think they are late 40's early 50's, if thats so they would have worn woollen stockings with baggy knickers over the top. thats why there is a gap at the top of the dancers leg.
Love looking at old dance postcards to see how things change, just look at the arms
Celticcat your picture is taken in Knappogue Castle near me and the blue tights are great

Here's a good one. I was looking for old Irish dance photos on the Internet and came across a site about the history of Irish dance. I had to laugh when I came across this part:

"The costumes worn by Irish dancers today commemorate the clothing of the past. Each school of dancing has its own distinct dancing costume. Dresses are based on the Irish peasant dress worn two hundred years ago."

Geez when was THIS written? Peasant dresses??

Wow, these pictures are great. What a nice idea!

Here's one: An Irish dance dressmaker from "back in the day." Actually, I have no idea what she's doing, it just went along with the Irish-dance-dresses-based-on-peasant-clothing theme.

She's spinning wool into yarn! Then she will weave you your peasant dress based solo dress!

This is probably one of the best threads I've ever seen on DDN! Keep them coming.

Hahaha I love that one, early on solos in the making!