With the Krewe of Nyx rolling tonight, it seems that female krewes have really been popular the last few years.
To give you an idea of how well female krewes are doing, the Krewe of Nyx has 3300 members, Muses on Thursday boasts over 1100 women riders, and Iris on Saturday over 3400 which is the largest krewe in Carnival history.
Errol Laborde, editor of New Orleans Magazine and Carnival historian, says the popularity a few years ago really started with Muses who also provided a lot of female marching groups. Then Laborde said Nyx saw how many women Muses had, and they jumped on the bandwagon, too.
"So Muses became very, very popular, had a long waiting list so that a few years later the people who started Nyx saw what Muses was doing and they saw the overflow with Muses and so Nyx was started," Laborde said.
But it didn't end there.
"All of a sudden you have two really large all female parades, but now the kicker to all of this is that before all of this started, there was only one major all women's parade in Orleans Parish and that was Iris parading on Saturday and Iris has been around a long time," Laborde noted.
Iris switched float builders, using Blain Kern, and the membership took off.
"The combination of the 3 parades for women is just enormous," Laborde said.
Just from last year that krewe has grown to the largest krewe in all of carnival history.