Polka Dots

I love stripes. I’m gonna write an essay about stripes because stripes go deep. Unfortunately, while looking into stripes, I got completely derailed by polka dots. Oh, man. Polka dots. Turns out polka dots are pretty cool for a couple of different reasons.

Fabric with dots on it has basically been around forever. People stitched dots into cloth, painted them on, wove them into patterns, printed them with blocks all kinds of ways. So dotted fabric itself was nothing new. What changed was industrial textile printing. By the early 1800s, machines were making it possible to print repeating patterns much faster, cheaper, and more evenly than somebody doing it by hand. Suddenly you could get these nice, regular rows of dots instead of every dot being a little different from the one next to it.

Then, around the 1840s, something completely unrelated happened, everybody lost their minds over the polka. The polka was this enormously popular dance that came out of Central Europe and spread across Europe and America. It became one of those crazes where the name escaped the original thing. Suddenly everything was polka. There were polka clothes, polka accessories, polka foods, polka this, polka that. 

And somewhere in the middle of all that, the dotted fabric pattern became the polka dot. There’s nothing about the dots themselves that has anything to do with the dance. It was basically just a fashionable name attached to a fashionable pattern. But polka dot stuck. The dance faded, the craze ended, and somehow the dots walked away carrying the name.

And I’m glad they did, because polka dots are cool. Polka-dot shirts? Cool. Polka-dot dresses? Obviously. Polka-dot socks? Definitely. I was supposed to be researching stripes, but this is the danger of looking into patterns. So much research, so little time.☮︎✌︎︎