A few weeks ago, while lying on my flu-bed, I happened to take in a number of episodes of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, which chronicles the wedding planning and the big day itself for young traveller girls living in England. For those unfamiliar with the travellers (formerly called tinkers), they’re an Irish nomadic group, found in England, Ireland, and parts of the US. They mostly live in caravans (mobile homes), and specialize in dog breeding, horse trading, roofing and paving – in a largely underground economy.
Travellers tend to be pretty insular, and live lives decidedly out of the mainstream. I’ve seen travellers a number of times in Ireland. Often times,I’ve seen children, or a young mother with child, out begging. One time in Galway, we were sitting in a pub having lunch when a traveller granny and her grandson came in and sat down near us. The kid fixed us with an if-looks-could-kill stare, while we did everything we could to avoid eye contact, in fear that he would suck out souls out. When granny went to pay her tab, she pulled a wad of bills about eight inches thick out of her skirt. On another trip, my husband and I, taking a stroll outside of Dingle, passed by a small travellers encampment – three or four caravans. As we were walking by, a little boy about three or four years old started pegging stones at us. We didn’t say anything – this was not a crew we wanted to tangle with – but just took off.
An interesting subculture, that’s for sure.
My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding take whats I’m sure is a typical “reality” show look at this subculture through the lens of a traveller wedding.
Traveller girls are strongly encouraged to remain virgins until their marriage, and are (thus not surprisingly) strongly encouraged to get married during their teens, after which they lose whatever small freedoms they enjoyed and live their lives strictly under the thumb of their husbands. For all of its sexual conservatism (the Irish travellers are devout, if somewhat superstitious, Roman Catholics), girls from a very young age (we’re talking five or six here) prance around in sluttish Bratz dolls garb, and dance in ways that would make a judge at a tiny tots beauty pageant blush.
Over the years, traveller weddings have turned into colossal productions – at least if we can trust My Big Fat at all, at all.
Precursor to the Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, by the way, is the Big Fat Gypsy First Holy Communion, for which the little ones get primped out in elaborate gowns that often outweigh them and are so uncomfortable that they draw blood, fancy hair-dos, and make up jobs that make Jon Benet-Ramsey appear natural. After receiving their first communion, the children attend elaborate parties, at which the girls do dances imitating Brittany Spears, Beyoncé, and whatever pole-dancers they’ve managed to see.
Then there are the weddings, for which girls don dresses that may weigh well over 300 pounds, and can cost upwards of 50,000 Euros. Here’s what we’re talkin’:
As with the communion dresses for the kiddies, these numbers can cause extreme discomfort, and the brides (at least as depicted on My Big Fat) can barely get down the aisle without toppling over.
Not to be outdone, here’s what the bridesmaids might be wearing (and here you were thinking that you had bridesmaids dresses that you’d never be able to wear again…)
But enough about My Big Fat for the mo’. What find really intriguing here – other than the way in which “reality” TV ends up defining “reality” - is that there is a dress designer who, over the years, has built up a specialty as the go-to for these elaborate rigs. Her name is Thelma Madine, and she’s the consistent thread throughout the episodes of My Big Fat that I’ve seen.
While she apparently does “normal” dresses – of the more Kate-ish and Pippa-ish variety – what Madine has done is carved out a unique niche for herself. It’s an interesting one, although with the traveller communities being relatively small, it might be a challenge to make your entire living at it. (On the other hand, at 50,000 Euros-per, you don’t have to design and sell a lot of these now, do you?)
Madine doesn’t have a web site that I could find, but she is on Facebook, where we learn that:
Thelma Madine is the owner of Liverpool-based Nico's Dressmakers. In 2006, she designed what is believed to be the world's biggest wedding dress for 16-year-old Carly O'Brien, which weighed in at a whopping 25st [25 stone, or 350 pounds] with a 60ft train. The 30,000 Swarovski crystals and 120 metres of silk are rumoured to have cost Carly's father more than £15,000. Not that Thelma's customers like to discuss prices.
Thelma has a made for reality TV backstory herself. (Source: Daily Mirror.)
Left divorced with three kids while in her 30’s, she went on the dole – and started sewing fancy christening dresses which she sold at a Liverpool flea market. Even though she was making decent money from her sales, Thelma stayed on the dole. (Oops.) And ended up serving four months in the Big House for fraud.
After her release in April 2002, Thelma went back to making children’s clothes for a market stall. She says: “One day a girl asked, ‘Do you do Gone With The Wind dresses?’ and I thought, ‘They’re just velvet and sticking-out dresses. I can do that’. So I said yeah.
“She wanted three for her girls and said she would be back next week to pick them up but, in true traveller-style, she didn’t turn up that week. So I put them up on the stall and every five minutes someone was asking, ‘How much are they?’ I thought, ‘My God, I have cracked it!’
“It was all the travellers who were asking me. So for the next few years I was making kids’ outfits for gypsy children, getting more and more extravagant.”
And then a traveller girl stopped by her booth to ask her to make her wedding dress – and the dresses for her 18 bridesmaids.
The rest is history – or, better yet, reality TV – and Thelma has been whipping up dresses for traveller weddings ever since. The wider, the more sparkling, the heavier the better. In one episode of My Big Fat, the dress had light-up butterflies on it.
So here’s to Thelma, a complete and utter success story.
From the downside of time-served for being a welfare cheat, to being a successful entrepreneur and reality TV star/household word.
I was going to say ‘only in America’, but this is the UK.
Ah, that shared cultural heritage!
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