Mardi Gras New Orleans is the loudest, gaudiest, most joyfully excessive folk-design tradition in America — a Catholic-Carnival street festival that turned the French Quarter into a papier-mâché opera. The trinity is fixed by decree: purple for justice, green for faith, gold for power, chosen by the Krewe of Rex in 1872 and never renegotiated. This system paints rolling cathedrals of gilded scrollwork against a deep royal-purple night. Every surface wants ornament — filigree cartouches, harlequin diamonds, bead-strand borders. The aesthetic says "throw me something, mister — and make it drip in gold."