If not for Catherine de Medici, Renaissance era Queen of France, the world might not be at all familiar with the ballet and its now-familiar costume, the tutu.
For it was this Queen's love and support of the arts that caused ballet to grow from an obscure dance intended for royal eyes only, to the graceful phenomenon that is now recognised the world over.
The Medici family was noted for attending royal gatherings of the world's finest artists, poets, musicians and dancers who would entertain for the royal courts.
From an early age, Catherine was exposed to these high art forms and throughout her life, supported and encouraged them.
Catherine became Queen when her husband, Henri, Duke of Orleans, became King Henri II.
Of France.
It was during this period of time that she orchestrated some fantastic and complex events that centered on the arts.
The entertainment often took on mythological Greek themes and her dancers were said to reflect the order and harmony of the celestial bodies as mentioned in Greek texts.
She viewed dance as having the ability to establish peace and harmony, and to find order from chaos.
Catherine and her King had ten children together.
One of their sons became King after his father's death and it was this son, with Catherine's influence, who commissioned the Italian dance master, Bergonzio di Botta, to arrange the first major Italian ballet at the wedding of Galeazzo Visconti, the Duke of Milan, and Isabel Aragon in Torrona.
The dances were cleverly designed to coincide with the various dinner courses that were served at the lavish affair.
  The people in attendance were so greatly impressed that many similar ballets began to be performed, leading eventually to the now-famed "Ballet Comique de la Reine.
" It was during this ballet that the first incarnations of today's modern tutu derived, although the Renaissance versions were a far cry from those known today.
They consisted of very long skirts, bloomers, corsets and tightly laced bodices that were quite restrictive for the dancers.
In fact, witnesses reported that they were barely able to discern any of the intricate footwork being performed.
The dancers also wore high-heeled shoes that greatly hampered their abilities to perform jumps, because landing proved to be so precarious an endeavor.
Those early dance costumes gave way eventually to one that more closely resembled the tutu of today, however it was still quite different.
The most notable early tutu in written history was worn by Marie Taglioni who danced La Sylphide during history's Romantic period.
It consisted of a long, ethereal-looking tulle skirt attached to a ballet.
Two versions of this tutu became popular in ballet during this period.
One had a dropped waist and the other did not.
The dropped waist variety had a skirt that began at the highest point on the hip and was referred to as a Romantic Tutu with Basque.
The ballet audiences demand to see more of the footwork that was developing in the dance form lead to the Classical tutu.
This costume formed a horizontally projected skirt that emanated from the dancer's hip, thus giving the additional exposure.
The tutu continued to grow smaller through the years to expose more and more of the dancer's feet and legs, which lead, finally, to the more modern Russian-influenced tutus and the Balanchine-influenced powder puff styles of today.
The sparsely constructed contemporary tutu is tremendously versatile in its different combinations of fabrics, lines and colors.
Instantly recognisable and associated with ballet, the tutu remains one of the most highly acclaimed dance costumes in the history of dance.