Polka Dots Mood Board

The following is a mood board that I put together as a part of my research.

My topic is History of Polka Dots.

There are a couple of theories of how and where polka dots originated:

1. Eastern European immigrants that came into the US in late 19th century brought along the playful pattern. Another thing that came with the immigrants was the dance Polka and that's why in the minds of general US public both the pattern and the dance went hand in hand. Therefore the pattern started to be referred as Polka dots.

2. Walt Disney invented polka dots when he was designing the dress of his cartoon character Minnie Mouse. The story goes that while he was drawing a character some of his ink accidentally dripped onto the page and some of it fell onto the dress of the drawn character. Walt thought that it was a lucky coincidence simply because he didn't want to do a solid color dress because it's too boring; stripes were out of style at the time and the dots seemed to be a perfect medium.

3. In 1960 Brian Hyland introduced his infamous “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” song and that's where the term came from.

That's all that I could dig up on the history so far.

Here's a couple of things/objects that are famous for being polka dotted:

clothing

kitchen ware

plants

animals

Roy Lichtenstein's paintings

cartoon characters