No one could be more imposing than the Empress at times of State,” observed lady-in-waiting Countess Golovine, but “no one could be greater, kinder, or more indulgent than she in her private circle.”1 Adding to the pomp and ceremony of the Russian court was the spectacular attire of Catherine and her courtiers. From dazzling jewelry and gold and silver embroidered gowns to silk uniform dresses that matched those of her regiments, Catherine used fashion to further her ambitions and strengthen alliances in the same way she used her art collecting and service commissions.
It was Peter the Great who first made dress part of his sweeping cultural reforms. Having personally trimmed the beards of a group of Russian boyars with a pair of scissors, he issued a clean-shaven decree for all of his courtiers and officials. Anyone refusing to shave had to pay a beard tax. Peter wielded shears on another occasion, this time cutting off the sleeves and bottoms of his guests’ long, traditional-style coats. This was the start of his famous clothing reforms. Between 1701 and 1724, Peter issued seventeen edicts making “Saxon and French” dress compulsory for Russia’s urban population.
As European tailors began training Russian apprentices, anyone caught producing or selling Russian garments faced “dreadful punishment.” Peter used economic incentives to establish a domestic textile industry that produced wool for army uniforms, linen sailcloth for the navy, and silk for court dress. To set an example, the tsar only wore clothing made from Russian textiles. Despite these developments, many wealthy Russians continued to buy luxurious French silks, Irish linens, and British cottons and wools. The worst infractor was Peter’s daughter Elizabeth. When she died, her closets were filled with thousands of pairs of shoes and some 15,000 European-style gowns—made with European, not Russian, textiles.2
Like his European counterparts, Peter created a Table of Ranks in 1722—an official list of military, civil, and court ranks and classes that specified uniforms for each branch of state service. Catherine added her own rules, including those for clothing. In general, the higher the rank, the more gold embroidery and decorations were worn. Courtiers had a range of uniforms and dresses for various occasions, like church visits and official receptions. Costumes, hats, and sword hilts were all studded with diamonds.
On September 22, 1770, on the eighth anniversary of her coronation, Catherine initiated a new type of ceremonial court dress, or rather, a reinvention—one that continued until the end of the Romanov dynasty in 1917. To a ball honoring her coronation, Catherine wore a Russian-style dress, something that had not been seen at court in seventy-five years. Around this time, Russian intellectuals began questioning the imitation of French fashion, manners, and language, voicing concerns that Russian culture was in danger of disappearing. In June 1775, to celebrate the peace treaty with Turkey, the Military School for the nobility arranged for a celebration in Catherine’s honor. Festivities included an allegorical spectacle, “The Destruction of the Temple of Fashion,” and performance of a comedy mocking Russia’s passion for French fashion. The popular comedy was performed several times that month.
This nationalism wasn’t lost on Catherine. Russian-style dress became mandatory for formal court occasions. On specific holidays, female courtiers were required to wear white satin gowns under red velvet sarafan-like robes ending in long trains, along with gem-studded Russian tiaras or kokoshniks. On August 30, 1775, many of Catherine’s courtiers attended a feast day wearing similar dresses. By Catherine’s name day celebration that fall, all courtiers were wearing the Russian style.3 According to Christine Ruane, Catherine hoped Russian court dress would bridge the cultural divide created by Peter the Great’s westernization policies. “The initial feelings of inferiority that Russians had felt toward their western European neighbors were replaced by a growing sense of comfort and confidence,” writes Ruane.4 In the early 19th century, Russian empresses began wearing Catherine’s “Frenchified sarafan” for their coronations.
Inspired by England’s Knights of the Order of the Garter, Peter the Great founded the Order of Saint Andrew, the first of Russia’s six military orders. In 1714, he made his wife head of the order of Saint Catherine, the second order in European history exclusively for women. Before Catherine, Russia’s knights had worn their specially designed robes only on their order’s annual holiday. Catherine increased the orders’ prestige by turning the robes into the main form of court uniform and mandatory attire for high ceremonial days. In 1769, Catherine founded the Order of St. George, selecting members for their military victories.
Catherine never forgot that the Guard regiments had helped bring her to power. For parades and regiment festivals, the empress wore dresses of her own design, made to complement the uniform of each regiment. Corresponding to the color of the officers’ attire, Catherine’s “uniform dresses” combined the predominant French fashion (open dress, farthingale, sometimes a “Watteau pleat”) with elements of Russian national costume (a long folded sleeve with an open armhole, and a sarafan-like decoration).5 The first of these uniform dresses—for the Preobrazhensky Life Guards in 1763—was made of blue silk with red cuffs and collar, with gold lace, bronze stamping, and gilding with gold buttons down the front of dress and coat. Like her male predecessors, Catherine wore these uniform dresses to receive officers at parades and regiment festivals.
Designers took note of the classical craze sweeping Europe, producing light, high-waisted dresses and simpler jewelry. Two decades into her reign, Catherine issued dress reforms to counteract “the immense increase of the importation of French modes, millineries, and other similar productions, which, without exaggeration, run away with the whole benefit of the trade of Russia.”6 One offender was Catherine’s daughter-in-law, Maria Feodorovna, who ordered her dresses from Rose Bertin, Marie Antoinette’s personal shopper.
The goal of Catherine’s ceremonial and court dress edicts was “. . . to introduce greater simplicity and moderation to preserve their own prosperity for what is best and most useful and to avert from ruinous luxury . . .”7 One edict specified that gold and silver lace on caftans could not exceed three and a half inches in width. On major holidays, court guests were allowed to wear gold and silver Muscovite brocades; on other holidays and other days silken materials of all kinds; gentlemen were also permitted to wear wool. Male courtiers wore European uniforms; female courtiers wore the empress’s hybrid creations at certain ceremonial events. According to Richard Wortman, Catherine’s detailed dress requirements were a calculated political move. “Uniformity of dress showed the unity of the supra-national court elite . . . the rhetoric and styles of Catherine’s reign left little doubt about the predominance of the Great Russian nobility.”8
Catherine’s clothing decree was noticed in Paris, where improved relations between Russia and France resulted in a “fashion for all things Russian.” Melchior Grimm informed Catherine that Parisian streets sported “signs with the name of the Russian Empress, cafés and big hotels called Russia and even clothing shops with the sign Russian Dandy.” “. . . [H]ow interesting that the fashion should come from the North,” Catherine replied, “but it is even more remarkable that the North, more especially Russia, should be fashionable in France.”9
It wasn’t just Catherine and her courtiers who dressed to impress. Palace servants were required to wear formal green, red, and gold uniforms, along with special footwear and accessories. From the French word livree, or “clothes issued by the state and nobility for their entourage and attendants,” the livery wardrobe included uniforms for every day, Sunday-best, parade, and mourning wear. Court furriers, footmen, chamberlains, Araps or Black servants, and Cossacks all donned every day and ceremonial livery. Influenced by foreign styles, livery costumes were made by imperial tailors of the highest quality textiles with multiple fittings.
Catherine’s lavish entertaining required a larger imperial household staff. Men of the “palace-servant class” enjoyed special rights and privileges, including exemption from personal tributes and servitude. Starting at age sixteen, any Christian subject of the Russian Empire whose trustworthiness had been vetted by the palace police could enter court service. Preference was given to children of the palace-servant class and those who’d served a tour of military duty. Women worked in Catherine’s private quarters, the palace kitchens, and laundry.
Catherine’s court also became celebrated for its splendid jewelry. In 1714, Peter the Great moved part of the Kremlin Armory collection to St. Petersburg, including spectacular works of European gold and silver. Each of his successors continued to add to the Imperial Treasury. One of the first registers of court jewelry compiled after the death of Peter’s widow Catherine I in 1727 included ceremonial jewelry and regalia, brooches, bows, and costume decoration. Empress Anna Ioannovna added luxurious Augsburg gold and silver services. It was Empress Elizabeth who formed the nucleus of the Hermitage jewelry collection with glittering rococo acquisitions. These included spectacular French snuffboxes and diamond-studded necessaires (sets of grooming items), and English watches on jeweled chatelaines (attached to the bodice of her dresses).
Elizabeth didn’t hesitate to summon court jeweler Jérémie Pauzié to the palace in the middle of the night to share her latest jewelry ideas. He created rings, earrings, snuffboxes, and exquisite gem flower bouquets for the jewelry-loving tsarina, whose habit was contagious. “The ladies of the Court wore amazing quantities of diamonds,” wrote Pauzié. “Ladies of comparatively low rank may be wearing as much as ten to twelve thousands roubles worth of diamonds.”10 So not to be out-blinged, Elizabeth decreed that ladies at court could only wear half a hair adornment, on the left side, along with a single tremblant (a sparkling hair ornament from the French word for quiver).11 A full tiara was the sole prerogative of the empress.
Recognizing the symbolic importance of gems, Catherine tapped Pauzié to create her jaw-dropping coronation crown. Diamonds and precious gems were synonymous with power and rank, and Catherine instructed her agents to search the globe for the most beautiful examples. In her quest, Catherine enjoyed a distinct advantage. The discovery of silver and gold in the Urals combined with continued imports of precious metals gave Catherine unlimited resources. For the next three decades, she added dazzling pieces to the imperial jewelry collection, leaving no doubt about Russia’s growing wealth and power.
From her diamond chamber at the Winter Palace, Catherine selected jewels to wear to her official appearances—like a diamond and spinel esclavage and matching earrings she pinned to a velvet ribbon worn around her neck. Tiaras, aigrettes, and diamond hairpins completed the look. One of Catherine’s ornaments was a silver flower branch dripping in diamonds. To intensify the dazzling effect, the jeweler added colored foils under the transparent stones.
On one occasion, Catherine confided to Prince de Ligne that she could have served Russia better if she had been born a man. “Believe me,” he reassured her, “you are so much more impressive in your beautiful embroidered orange red velvet dolman or tunic than a man decked out in boots and shoulder sash can ever be. In addition the five huge diamonds blazing out from your hair are far more effective than a man’s hat which is either ridiculously small or ridiculously big.”12
Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting and maids-of-honor followed her lead, sewing or pinning small shimmering diamonds in various shapes onto their garments. They also wore a badge of office—a crowned monogram of Catherine “EII” set in diamonds (chiffre) worn on a bright blue ribbon (through a ring on the pendant’s back). “Among the manifold signs of wealth which distinguish the Russian nobility there is none more likely to impress the foreigner than the abundance of diamonds and precious stones which glitter everywhere,” wrote William Coxe. “In this the gentlemen rival the ladies—many of the nobles are literally covered with diamonds.”13 Catherine and her close circle played card games for diamonds; even her table was set with jewels as James Harris, first Earl of Malmesbury noted. “The dessert at supper was set out with jewels to the amount of upwards of two millions sterling.”14
With her patronage, Catherine turned St. Petersburg into one of the world’s jewelry-making centers. When Jérémie Pauzié returned to Geneva in 1764, a colony of foreign goldsmiths was forming in the capital. Among Catherine’s favorite goldsmiths was Leopold Pfisterer, hired by Dmitry Golitsyn, who extended his six-year contract by thirty-four more years. Swiss goldsmith Jean-Pierre Ador arrived in Russia the year after Catherine’s accession and remained until his death in 1784. Johann Gottlieb Scharff, born in Moscow to German parents, arrived in the capital in 1772. Prussian brothers Francois-Claude and Pierre-Etienne Theremin were known for their simple, classical designs. By the end of Catherine’s reign, foreign artisans in the capital outnumbered Russian artisans nearly two to one, including fifty-nine master goldsmiths and fifty-one master silversmiths.15
To her painted and sculpted likenesses, Catherine added her miniature portraits set in jewelry and medallions. Peter the Great, like his European contemporaries, had awarded his own portrait miniature as badges of office and tokens of gratitude. Catherine followed suit, doling out miniatures of herself set beneath diamonds in rings, pins, watches, bracelet clasps, and medallions. On one occasion, Catherine joked with Ligne: “Since you told me that you would either sell, gamble or lose any diamonds I would give you, here are no more than 100 roubles’ worth bordering my portrait in a ring.”16
Catherine also presented her portrait to Gregory Orlov’s younger brother, Alexei Orlov, aka Scarface. “He is a monster in appearance and his strength is beyond belief,” wrote British visitor Catherine Wilmot. “. . . He wears the empress’s picture set in diamonds of enormous size and instead of a glass, ’tis a single diamond which covers the portrait.”17 In 1768, as a thank-you for inoculating her, Paul, and Gregory Orlov against smallpox, Catherine made British physician Thomas Dimsdale a baron and gave him a diamond-set boîte à portrait of herself and the grand duke. Packaged in silk-lined leather boxes, these miniature portraits usually featured Catherine’s enamel picture framed in diamonds. Dimsdale reciprocated by presenting Catherine with a pair of greyhounds she named Sir Thomas Anderson and Lady Anderson.
An obsessive gem collector, Catherine also commissioned her portrait in hardstone. In the early 1770s, she gave Gregory Orlov a spectacular pendant with an emerald intaglio carved by Johann Caspar Jaeger. Framed by circular cut diamonds, the gem featured Catherine’s portrait in profile, with a laurel wreath and pearl head ornament. Around the same time, Jaeger produced another pendant with Catherine’s agate cameo profile portrait within a brilliant-cut diamond border topped by an imperial crown and attacked to a diamond chain. Agate portrait cameos of Catherine were also set into diamond-bordered rings.
During Catherine’s reign, snuffboxes became one of the most coveted royal gifts. Following his European counterparts, Peter the Great introduced snuff to the St. Petersburg court. Sprinkled on the back of the hand and inhaled, the powdered, scented tobacco was so popular that it spawned the creation of elaborate jeweled containers. Collected by royals and aristocrats, these charming boxes represented the height of luxury. According to contemporaries, though Catherine “never carried a snuffbox, nevertheless, the latter were to be found everywhere, on all the tables and window sills in her study. She used tobacco grown especially for her in Tsarskoye Selo near St Petersburg, always taking it with the left hand, because her right hand was meant for the loyal subjects to kiss.”18
Catherine bought jeweled snuffboxes from the finest goldsmiths in St. Petersburg and Europe. Elizabeth’s whimsical rococo boxes in the shape of baskets, fruit, flowers, and women’s shoes were replaced by symmetrical neoclassical designs often featuring Catherine’s monogram and portrait miniature. In addition to official gifts, Catherine gave snuffboxes with her portrait miniatures to family members on their name days and other occasions; her lovers discovered intimate notes inside their jeweled boxes. In 1768, Catherine sent Voltaire a turned ivory box with her portrait. “I would love to send you verses in exchange for yours,” she wrote. “But if one is not clever enough to write good verses, it is better to work with one’s hands. Here is how I practice what I preach. I have turned a snuff-box, which I beg you to accept. It bears the impress of the person who has the greatest respect for you. I need not name that person, whom you will easily recognize.”19
In an earlier letter to Voltaire, Catherine wrote: “My emblem is a bee, flying from plant to plant, and amassing honey to take back to the hive.” “If your crest is a bee,” Voltaire replied, “you have an incredible hive, it’s the largest in the world.”20 Catherine repeated the bee motif in many pieces of jewelry. In one splendid example, Johann Gottleib Scharff created a silver and cobalt blue enamel snuffbox encircled with diamonds. Beneath a sheet of rock crystal, Scharff’s diamond framed oval medallion contains gold bees flying from a diamond beehive to a rose bush topped with Catherine’s motto “Useful” in gold letters. Another Scharff snuffbox featured an enamel miniature of Catherine’s beloved Italian greyhound, Lisette, surrounded by two circles of pea-sized diamonds, two circles of slightly smaller emeralds, and hundreds of smaller gems.
During the 1770s, St. Petersburg’s goldsmiths began collaborating with miniaturists to create beautiful enamel snuffboxes, watchcases, and miniature portraits with rich fade-proof colors. Among the best known miniaturists were Russians Peter Zharkov and Dmitry Yevreinov and Frenchman Charles-Jacques de Mailly. Ségur owned one such enamel box, decorated with a portrait of Catherine wearing a fur-trimmed hat. In 1768, Catherine presented a spectacular enameled box to Gregory Orlov. The diamond-rimmed gold tabatière by Jean-Pierre Ador and enamellist Kaestner featured enamel miniatures of scenes from her coup d’état (Smithsonian, Washington, D.C.). Ador received his largest imperial commission in 1774 when Catherine ordered thirty gold boxes for a tenth anniversary gift to participants in her coup. Ador incorporated both sides of Johann Georg Waechter’s coronation medal: Catherine in profile as the helmeted and armored Minerva on the lid and a related allegorical scene for the base.
Catherine’s enormous outlays on fashions, jewelry, and accessories were a public relations bonanza, helping create a sophisticated, cultured image for her court. “The richness and splendour of the Russian court exceed the most extravagant descriptions,” raved William Coxe in 1778. “. . . [The] splendor and brilliance of court finery and the profusion of precious gems leave the pomp of other European courts far behind them. . . . Nothing is as amazing as the wealth of precious gems that sparkle on every part of the robes. . . . The most lavish wearing of gems was characteristic for the women at the European courts, but in Russia, the men competed with the women in this: nearly all of the dignitaries were covered with brilliants, [on] buttons, buckles, saber hilts, epaulets, and hats.”21