Why does Mickey wear white gloves?

The glove phenomenon was a THING in classic animation 😳 So many studios employed this technique of adding gloves to their characters, not just Disney studios (Bugs Bunny, for example, though he was partially inspired by a Disney rabbit from Tortoise and the Hare, so he was already part Disney without the gloves 😂) Even Mario and Luigi are rockin’ their own pair of white gloves.

Over the years while researching Mickey, I’ve run into a lot of people who have said that the gloves are attached to Vaudeville and some of the questionable practices that happened within that art medium. While it’s true, Mickey did get his gloves for the first time in the short The Opry house in 1929, and while it did feature a Vaudeville-style show, everything that I’ve read from Walt Disney directly seems to imply that the gloves and the shoes that Mickey donned were mainly for ease of animation. They were not meant to be some sort of commentary or endorsing a particular practice. This makes sense logically as not every single cartoon that followed this one was set in Vaudeville setting, and yet Mickey continued to wear gloves and shoes. (There was, however, a short in 1933 that did feature some racial stereotyping that was considered acceptable in that era but would definitely not be today, and I make no excuses for that).

I do love that they couldn’t quite decide on how many fingers Mickey should have the very beginning 😂 It reminds me of how Disney didn’t standardize the costumes for the characters in Disneyland for quite a few years, but eventually realized it was a problem and gave them stricter standards in the 1960s.

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