Big Top Collection - Yellow & Red

Striped Silk Taffeta.

Content: 100% Silk Taffeta
Horizontal Repeat:  6"
Stripes:  2"
Width: 54"

The first Big Top went up in 1826.  It was 90 feet in diameter.  Over the next one hundred years it would swell to as much as 600 feet long (or 200 yards), with a capacity of 10,000 spectators.  It housed the birth of the American Circus.  Beneath its arched-stripe dome the tiny toiled and performed, General Tom Thumb at 25 inches tall impersonated Cupid, and the mighty paraded and reared as the 11 1/2 foot Jumbo the Elephant reached to heights of 26 feet, from toe to trunk.

While Europe's circuses were moored to their traditional wood buildings, the American circus was on the move, traipsing through the famed wagon-wheeled Mud Shows to eventually arrive at the rails, where the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus finally required 90 double-length railroad cars to get The Greatest Show on Earth to you.  All because of the Big Top.  Designed for the utilitarian purpose of protecting performers and patrons from the heat or rain, the Big Top also meant rain or shine, anywhere and anytime.  

But that time is gone, ending officially in 1956 with John Ringling North's pronouncement that, “The tented circus is a thing of the past!”  And though the days of the single, straggling clown wondering into town to promote the plodding circus a few hours behind are sadly gone, the circus has already rolled across the American imagination, has already captivated us, has already taught us, has already entertained us. 

Besides, we smugly smile to know that the Ringling Brothers first exotic animal was a blind hyena.