Young Edmund Bertram is displeased with a dinner guest's disparagement of the uncle who took her in: "With such warm feelings and lively spirits it must be difficult to do justice to her affection for Mrs. Crawford, without throwing a shade on the Admiral.
"[3] According to gender studies scholar John C. Hawley, the expression "throwing shade" was used in the 1980s by New York City's working-class in the "ballroom and vogue culture".
He writes that it refers to "the processes of a publicly performed dissimulation that aims either to protect oneself from ridicule or to verbally or psychologically attack others in a haughty or derogatory manner.
"[4] The first major use of "shade" that introduced the slang to the greater public was in Jennie Livingston's documentary film, Paris Is Burning (1990), about the mid-1980s drag scene in Manhattan.
[2][4] In the documentary, one of the drag queens, Dorian Corey, explains that shade derives from "reading", the "real art form of insults".
[2] In 2015, Anna Holmes of The New York Times Magazine wrote: Shade can take many forms — a hard, deep look that could be either aggressive or searching, a compliment that could be interpreted as the opposite of one.