Princess to Maid

AndiJF has kindly shared a subtitled video from a Chinese TV show. Looks like a fairytale with our favourite premise. A maidservant swaps bodies with her mistress with the help of an evil sorcerer! 

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Downton Abbey Ladies Switch With Maids

Harper's Bazaar strikes with a lady-to-maid photo shoot with Downton Abbey cast.  The show itself did play a little bit with the lady disguised as a maid trope so no wonder. 

At a stuccoed country house location in the middle of West London, the world of Downton Abbey is being turned upside down. “Oh, I could get used to this,” says Sophie McShera, a.k.a. kitchen maid turned cook Daisy Mason, as she lounges on a velvet sofa in pink organza Dolce & Gabbana, while a toned-down Elizabeth McGovern, a.k.a. Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham, serves tea. “I’m usually carrying trays and wearing a gray sack!”

Next door, in another ornately appointed room, Michelle Dockery, a.k.a. Lady Mary Crawley, has stepped into the shoes of her trusted lady’s maid, Anna Bates, while Joanne Froggatt, the actress who plays her, ponders which designer shoes to wear. “After so many years of playing Lady Mary, it was fun to switch roles and play a maid for Bazaar,” says Dockery. “Anna waited on Lady Mary so faithfully over the years—dressing her, mending her clothes, and brushing her hair. It was nice to be able to wait on Jo for a change.”

Sadly it's a bit bland and the maids are dressed in designer dresses and there is little of it. Could have been a lot more fun if they went further with the idea - there are so many options! I know I would have had a blast if it was me doing the photoshoot. Still worth a look, our imagination will do the rest.

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Merle Oberon. Art Imitating Life Imitating Art.

Margo Taft and her "maid"

If there ever was a place with over-abundance of skeletons in the closet it’s Hollywood. However, this real story is quite something even by its standards. 

One of the characters in The Last Tycoon, a recent Amazon TV series based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished last novel about movie studio business, is actress Margo Taft, a fiercely independent star who has a secret that could ruin her career – she’s half-black and is only passing for white, while her real mother is by her side, masquerading as her black maid Lucille. 

Of course, there is nothing new about the whole “passing for white” phenomenon back in the day with numerous actors and actresses (as well as people from other walks of life) hiding their real origin (if their looks allowed) to get a better chance in life. What I didn’t know was that the story about a non-white mother acting as maid to her own “white” daughter is loosely based on an actual Hollywood story, that of Merle Oberon.

Largely forgotten today, Oberon was a big star in the 1930s and 1940s, renowned for her striking beauty.  Her most famous role is probably that of Cathy in the 1939 classic adaptation of Wuthering Heights alongside Laurence Olivier.  Looking at her pictures it boggles me why no one really suspected that she was mixed race, especially at the time when people allegedly paid so much attention to these things, but, not unlike Liberace, she managed to take her big secret – she was born in Bombay in 1911 to a British father and an under-age half-Sri Lankan mother (with some Maori blood to boot) – to her grave. 

Throughout her career she concealed her ethnic origin and maintained that she was born in Tasmania (apparently considered a lot more acceptable that Bombay, not to mention the birthplace of Hollywood’s great Errol Flynn) and only moved to India after her upper-class father died in a “hunting accident”. 

Every Maid's Dream: Vida de Empreguete

A reader sent me a link to a video that I'd like to share with you. It's a short clip about a Brazilian maid who has a dream that she switches lives with her mistress and starts imagining how she's going to treat her. A common theme, of course, but I liked it. Naturally, as one would expect, the Mistress is whiter, taller and skinnier - a theme explored in endless fashion editorials, including one from Vogue Brazil, incidentally, where a maid and a mistress almost look like different species or that Playboy Brazil spread with a blonde madame and a dark-skinned maid. 

The catchy song in that video is actually quite interesting too. I found the lyrics and, needless to say, it's a lady-to-maid manifesto/maid empowerment anthem of sorts with lines like "I want to see the Madame here in my place/I would laugh a lot" or "One day I would buy an apartment and become a socialite/All hot, I am going to travel with my casual date" and so on. You can read it here with a (very basic) English translation. 

The Maids. Your turn, Ma'am!

Edwardian risqué comedy meets Jean Genet's eponymous play meets lady-to-maid/maid-to-lady (well, admittedly the latter's largely in my head) in this entertaining 5-minute short I stumbled upon. Love the accents and the uniforms!


The Maids from Adam Woods on Vimeo.

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Another perfect lady-to-maid opportunity missed!

I have to admit that Downton Abbey, despite its focus on the whole upstairs-downstairs theme in an early 20th century setting, has largely passed by me. However, as a compulsive collector of maid images for years I could not help but discover quite a number of screen grabs from that show - they are literally ubiquitous! What I did not realise (but strongly suspected given the subject matter) was that one of the episodes in Season 4 had one of the ladies dressing up as a maid to fool a non-suspecting commoner who finds her attractive. Fans of the show please prove me wrong, but as far as I can tell it did not really go anywhere plot-wise in later episodes despite the classic "lady-to-maid" set up... This small subplot was uploaded to youtube in two short clips and I am happy to share it with you even though it's quite light on lady-to-maid content (but I am sure we can easily invent the rest!).

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Olivia Holt in Generous: A Lady to Maid?

I've come across a new music video by Olivia Holt called Generous. Lyrics, as one would expect from an aspiring 19-year-old American pop singer, feature gems like "gonna give you that uhm" and "just want you on me/hey, say that you want me", but it's rarely that a music video comes along that features a traditional maid uniform so I couldn't help but share it with you. The plot is clearly inspired by that romantic hideousness known as Maid in Manhattan, but to an avid lady-to-maid fan it can also easily be interpreted as a rich socialite playing dress up as a maid. I've attached a few screen grabs under the youtube video. 

Thalia Becomes a Hotel Maid

Mexican superstar Thalia is playing dress up as a hotel maid in a "reality" TV series called Asi Es Come Lo Hacemos (This is How we do it). It's in Spanish, but easy to understand. Definetely worth 5 minutes of your time. 

The uniform is exquisite and in contrast to the one worn by the real maid there. The whole set up does look like a plot of one of the lady-to-maid stories - a bored singer/model/actress wants a simpler life with predictable results... I actually found the real maid helping her interesting. The contrast between her and Thalia is incredible, she looks old enough to be her (destitute) mother even though they could be about the same age (Thalia, being a pampered lady, easily looks 15 years younger than her real age here). Anyway, here it is:

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Who Killed Amazoula: A Maid in Louboutins

A very pretty maid in a traditional black and white uniform and an exceedingly impractical pair of high heels is a witness to the crime in this stylish 2016 Christian Louboutin video ad campaign. If only all hotel maids looked liked that! Unless the maid being interrogated is actually not a servant at all, but a lady in disguise with only her expensive shoes giving away her real station in life. Wondering if the detective noticed that little detail. Think of all the lady-to-maid possibilities...

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First Ever Lady-to-Maid Film From 1897!

After the Ball (1897), a silent short directed by Georges Méliès, is often credited as the first "erotic" film ever made or, more accurately, the earliest known movie to show (simulated) nudity. However, the way the "maid" looks at the camera around the 1:00 mark and the whole set-up, how quickly the "lady" must undress, strongly suggests they are on to something! Could it possibly be lady-to-maid roleplay? I'd certainly like to think that!

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Belle De Jour: Vogue Spain 2012

I've used one of the photographs from this fashion editoral to illustrate a story here a while back without fully realizing what it was based on or that it was part of a bigger, 10-page shoot. Not only does it have a properly and stylishly outfitted maid as opposed to some "French maid"-inspired monstrosity, that many such editorials have, it is also based on Luis Bunuel's classic Belle De Jour (1967), a fetishistic masterpiece and, at its core, a social downgrade story, featuring a very young Catherine Deneuve.

To add another lady-to-maid connection, Bunuel also made one of the the four film adaptations of another fetishistic masterpiece, this one with far more obvious maid connotatation - Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) with Jeanne Moreau - now, I'd love to see that made into a fashion spread! Incidentally, I've become a big fan of Bunuel's work long before my interest in lady-to-maid stories and it only recently it dawned on me that, given his work, he must have been quite a fan of such plots as well.

Maids: Korean TV drama (2015)

I've been alerted to "Maids", a TV drama set in medieval Korea, a while back by a reader of this blog, but it's only recently that I've found time to take a look at the first few episodes. I've already mentioned the strange fascinations that most East Asian nations, including Korea, have with maids and servants. Maids are mainstays of fashion magazine spreads - for example, Vogue Korea  or Vogue Japan. There is the odd phenomenon of "maid cafes", where waitresses are dressed like French maids. There is even, as I've recently discoved, a Japanese girl band appropriately called Band-Maid, whose members are always dressed as maids, even though they play hard rock.

So it was hardly a surprise for me that Koreans would make a TV series with a plot made for Ladies Becoming Maids blog.