deny nothing, doubt everything

Esmeralda is very much not a princess (she's a working class revolutionary hero), but she was at one point part of the official Disney Princess line up, and I love her. She's absolutely one of my favourite Disney characters, even though I do acknowledge there's some major issues in her and Romani people's portrayal in the film. There is absolutely a lot of fetishistic Orientalism. Like with Jasmine, the Orientalism is definitely visible in her design as well. Compared to most other Disney "princesses", her face is very mature and kind of sultry, her body is pretty curvy and her clothing only accentuates that and is pretty revealing too in Disney standards. Esmerald is Romani and since Roma have been depicted so poorly in Western media since forever basically (as you'll soon see), before going to my references and such, I thought it would be beneficial to go through a bit of the history of Roma in art. I'll refer to the g-slur, when talking about art that includes that term in titles and stuff (I don't think it benefits to erase the usage of such slurs from history) but to be clear it is a slur.

On top of the fetishism, her outfit is very stereotypically "Bohemian", which I mean in the both of the word's meanings (but not in it's third secret (original) meaning, the historical region of the Czech Republic). The name for Bohemian style comes from the word used to refer to Roma people in France specifically. Roma were called Bohemians, because when they first entered France in the Middle Ages, they did so under the protection of the Bohemian Crown. They basically had assurance from the king that they are cool and good and let them into your country. The 19th century counterculture movements, who leaned heavily into mysticism and Orientalism, were very interested in the Romani people, who they fetishized as these free spirited, mystical and exotic Oriental people. They appropriated a lot of the superficial features of Roma culture and mixed it in with a lot of racist stereotypes and superficial features of other "Oriental" cultures they saw as basically the same as Roma. After all a significant feature of Orientalism is flattening and essentialising very diverse cultures. Specifically Bohemianism was the primary movement appropriating Roma people, but it did bleed into a lot of the other related movements as well. They practiced free love, van life and voluntary poverty, being basically the hippies of the 19th century, and of course created their own fashion that appropriated a lot of superficial features of Romani dress, very much foreshadowing the hippie fashion. The stereotypical idea of Romani dress is very much influenced by them and the later hippies, more than actual Roma people to be honest.

Here's a sample of "Bohemian" fashion and costuming from the turn of the century. First is a photo of American actress, Evelyn Nesbit, from 1901. Second is likely from 1911 (could not find origin of the photo, but couple of places said it was from 1911, which checks out since the hairstyle and the shape of the corset are very much early 1910s). The third is a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir from 1868, "Lisa the Bohemian", of a young woman part of the original Bohemianism movement.

The effects of Bohemianism can be seen directly in art depicting Romani in the Late Victorian Era. Here's an example of a painting ("Gypsy") depicting Renaissance setting with a Romani woman in very inaccurate costume by Victor Langye from 1878.

To find out what actually Romani women wore at the time of the film, first we have to define the setting. The original novel by Victor Hugo was set in 15th century Paris, which surprisingly roughly does correspond with the setting depicted in the Disney film (though obviously there's nothing 15th century about Esmeralda's under-boob corset). The issues come from the lack of visual depictions and other information of Roma before 16th century. The sources are very limited especially on Romani dress from Medieval Era. During the feudal era Roma were relatively well positioned in the European feudal society as merchants and craftsmen (often smiths) who traveled between the dispersed communities. But when feudalism begun to decline during the Renaissance and the merchant class rose to a new prominence, their role became unnecessary, even a threat. It was also the same time colonialism begun and concept of race was being invented, and so discrimination and racism against Roma started. So when before Romani had been mostly dismissed by the upper classes, who dictated what was in art, now they were not dismissed anymore, they were targeted.

Roma were most often depicted as fortune tellers, usually in these humorous paintings, where the "joke" is that the Romani fortune tellers are swindling or outright robbing their Poor White Victims (*insert smallest violin playing meme*). First here's an example of that by Georges de La Tour from 1630s France. The genre evolved to involve an "ironic" meta "joke" where white the fortune teller is robbing their mark, another white person (usually a man) is robbing the fortune teller. The second image below is an example of that by French Nicolas Régnier, painted in 1625 Venice. At some point they didn't even need to outright show the Romani fortune teller robbing their client, since that was just assumed, and they could still do the joke where the "robber" is getting robbed herself, like in the third painting by Simon Vouet from c. 1620 France.

Despite the racism (rarely a good start for a sentence), these Renaissance/Early Modern depictions of Roma are valuable sources of information for the dress of Romani women. The artists rendered these type of genre scenes (painting depicting everyday life) from live models with accuracy and naturalism. So instead of making some educated guess what Romani women wore in 15th century I decided to rather move the setting up to 16th to early 17th century and make something based on some primary evidence.

The base of Romani dress seemed to be similar to what other working class people wore at the time - loosely structured bodies in a full petticoat with (or without) detachable sleeves on top of the usual full sleeved chemise. Full petticoat was what a base layer dress with sewn together bodice and skirt was called, and it was the standard thorough the 16th century and kept being the standard, especially for lower classes, through the early 17th century. The distinctive features seem to be the toga-like shawl pinned on the shoulder and the white scarf used as either veil or turban. The dress seemed broadly similar in both Italy and France, where this type of genre painting was most popular.

The shawl (which name I couldn't find) was full length, as seen in the first painting below by Italian Leonello Spada from 1614-1615. This style of shawl seemed to have persisted quite a long while too since it's depicted in the second painting from 1836 by Alexandre-Marie Colin.

The shawl seemed to have been most often dark blue, almost black (black colour was achieved by dying with certain blue pigments a lot of times), with a red band at the top, so that's what I went with for Esmeralda. I pushed it slightly towards purple to sort of go as close to the original design's colour palette as is historically reasonable. The bright purple colour was simply not possible in Renaissance Europe after the fall of Byzantine, when the knowledge to produce Tyrian purple was lost.

For her headwear I went with turban since that's a bit closer to the original design's scarf, and used this Bartolomeo Manfredi painting from c. 1616-1617 as the basis for it's styling, since again, that's closest to the original design.