Fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, born in Algeria in 1936, arrived in Paris at the age of eighteen, studied fashion design at the school of the Chambre syndicale de la couture parisienne, and in 1955 landed an apprenticeship in the atelier of Christian Dior, who at the time was the most important fashion designer in the world.1 The inventor of the “New Look,” Dior had shocked and delighted postwar women with an exaggerated reinterpretation of the classic hourglass silhouette, complete with a nipped waist, full skirt, and aggressive bustline (Figure 6.1). When Dior died after suffering a heart attack in 1957, the twenty-one-year-old Saint Laurent was named his successor, thus becoming the youngest director of a major Parisian couture house. His first solo collection, presented in January 1958, included the triangular “trapeze dress” and other youthful looks and was received enthusiastically; the daily French newspaper Le Figaro went so far as to proclaim in its review that with these new designs “Saint Laurent has saved France.”2 Eager for greater artistic autonomy and frustrated with the business leadership at Dior, Saint Laurent opened his own couture house in 1962 and made an impact throughout the decade by presenting masculine looks reinterpreted for women, including trench coats and le smoking, a sexy and sophisticated version of the tuxedo. By the late 1970s, ensconced in a boutique in Paris’s bohemian Left Bank and the darling of the fashion crowd, he had pivoted away from minimalism with a line that was exotic, ethnic, decadent, and in tune with the changing tastes of his younger clientele. In March 1976 this Cossack Collection, inspired by the Ballets Russes and offered as an homage to Sergei Diaghilev, landed the designer and the long-deceased impresario on the front page of the New York Times. “Diaghilev Inspires Saint Laurent,” the newspaper’s headline read; “Today,” reporter Bernadine Morris asserted, “Yves Saint Laurent presented a fall couture collection that will change the course of fashion.”3 Saint Laurent’s clothes were hip and louche, an assortment of sweeping skirts, belted shirts, luxuriant embroidered fabrics, and fur coats and hats, all shown with slouchy boots and chunky jewelry (Figure 6.2). Vogue magazine reported that Saint Laurent’s “small waisted, big-skirted rich peasants in lamé and furs and passamenteried wools” had “knocked the town on its ear. . . . [T]he world won’t change, but it will look a little different.”4 The designer, who aimed to capture the spirit as well as the look of Diaghilev’s troupe, was pleased: “I do not know if it is my best collection,” he said at the time, “but it is my most beautiful.”5
Figure 6.1. Christian Dior, evening dress, 1954. © The Museum at FIT.
Figure 6.2. Runway photograph from Yves Saint Laurent’s “Ballets Russes” couture collection, 1976. Image courtesy of Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, Gladys Marcus Library Department of Special Collections.
Saint Laurent was not the first fashion designer in dialogue with the Ballets Russes, nor was he the first in France to look to Russia for inspiration and a clientele. Indeed, by the 1850s Charles Frederick Worth—the man conventionally credited with inventing haute couture—was outfitting Tsarina Maria Feodorovna and members of her royal household. The couturier John Redfern regularly visited the St. Petersburg court in the 1880s to outfit the ladies there and gather fabrics for his atelier in New York, thus bringing Russian elements into European dress. In March 1892 the New York Times noted that Redfern had “gone to Russia as he does every year, by command of the Empress,” and had returned with the idea to make tailored garments out of “Russian tweed” and “homespuns” woven by court women and peasants alike.6 By 1912 the style was all the rage, prompting the Times to announce that the rue de la Paix, the street at the heart of Paris haute couture, “made the world of fashion marvel by its showing of Russian and barbaric costumes.” Citing the popularity of “strong Russian colors, reds and orange and green, in flowing pennants of silk” and “the indispensability” of fur on these “Siberian novelties,” the newspaper singled Redfern out for recognition, praising his short skirts—“almost to the ankle”—done up in bright velvets and silks, trimmed with fox and sable, and his “voluminous turbans of orange velvet.” Jackets known as “Russian blouses” because of their large lapels, close-fitting waists, outsize buttons, and embroideries, were another novelty, which, the Times predicted, “will be very popular once things settle down a bit.” The Redfern boutique, the critic enthused, had become a veritable outpost of St. Petersburg, with a “tall Russian boy, in a native costume,” standing guard as the doorman. “The little fellow is a splendid specimen of the North,” he noted, “with brilliant complexion, red blouse, high boots, and Cossack cap in Persian wool.”7
Thus by the early twentieth century, when Diaghilev arrived in Paris, clothing and accessories identified with Russia were an established part of the fashion scene. The Ballets Russes reflected and reinforced this affinity, conjuring the homeland’s folkloric and ethnic dimensions, as well as its aristocratic and cosmopolitan traditions. The “Russian” productions were among the most popular of the Ballets Russes and even today remain central to Diaghilev’s legacy. They form a line that runs through the ensemble’s lifespan, falling into two distinct groups divided by the 1917 Revolution: in the first set, which begins with the troupe’s first season in Paris, these works include Le festin (1909), L’oiseau de feu (1910), Petrushka (1911), Le sacre du printemps (1913), Le coq d’or (1914), Le soleil de nuit (1915), and Contes russes (1917); the second group encompasses Mavra (1922), Renard (1922), Danses russes (1922), Les noces (1923), and Le pas d’acier (1927). In addition to these original works, Diaghilev revived two beloved ballets from the nineteenth-century Russian tradition—Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty (retitled The Sleeping Princess), both with music by Tchaikovsky and choreography by Marius Petipa—and produced acts from the iconic Russian operas Ivan the Terrible, by Rimsky-Korsakov, and Ruslan and Ludmila, by Mikhail Glinka. In these productions, Diaghilev’s Russia took shape in costumes and décors, choreography and music, tracing a timeline that ran from a remote prehistoric era right down to his own day.
By showcasing select historical events, rituals, folklore, and mythologies, the Ballets Russes posited a particular heritage for Russia and its arts that stretched into the past but had resonance in the contemporary world. In productions that reinforced specific social and political agendas, the troupe catalyzed action on the cultural front, notably adding to the debate on what exactly constituted “Russian” art in the first place. At issue was a conflict between “authentic” Russian peasant traditions and the Europeanized practices that had been absorbed into Russian culture starting in the eighteenth century. As early as the 1890s, Diaghilev and the artists gathered around him participated in this debate, declaring a commitment to the reinvigoration of Russian art through the reconciliation of aristocratic Europeanism and the popular arts of the peasantry. Ballet was a perfect platform for the advancement of this agenda, since it allowed for the clear presentation of specific rapprochements between peasant tradition and Western art in dance, art, music, and costume. As Diaghilev recalled in a 1916 interview with New York Times critic Olin Downes, the Ballets Russes seized on this opportunity, building on motifs found in “objects of utility (domestic implements in the country districts), in the painting on sleds, in the designs and the colors of peasant dresses, or the carving around a window frame.”8
In Diaghilev’s early Paris productions, Russia emerged as a kaleidoscope of color and pattern, an imaginary kingdom inspired by the materials of everyday life but infused with mystery and informed by the artistic present. The mythical Firebird, the waifish virgin sacrificed in The Rite of Spring, the village of Le coq d’or: the characters and settings of the prerevolutionary ballets highlighted peasant traditions but articulated them in modernist terms. After the war, Diaghilev and his artists changed direction to emphasize the Europeanized aspects of Russian culture, whether in the revival of Tchaikovsky’s interpretation of a classic French fairy tale in The Sleeping Princess, or in the opera buffa Mavra, which recalled both comic opera and contemporary Parisian entertainments. Even Les noces, on an explicitly Russian theme, was so highly stylized that audiences perceived it as more closely connected to contemporary European trends than to Russian ritual.
By presenting Russian dress and design in its varied forms, Diaghilev engaged a Russo-European tension over fashion that dated to the reign of Tsar Peter the Great (1672–1725). Under the so-called Petrine reforms, residents of the imperial city of Moscow, with the exception of clergy and agricultural laborers, were required to wear European clothing; artisans were prohibited from creating or selling native garments, and anyone caught wearing unsanctioned clothing within the city limits was heavily fined.9 As these mandates radiated out from Moscow to other areas of the country, Russia was divided in ways made obvious by clothing: while aristocrats and members of the upper classes wore European-style garments, peasants and those in the lower orders continued to adhere to traditional costume. Cultural nuances were diluted, as styles of dress and adornment identified with the multitude of cultural, tribal, and geographic communities across the empire were amalgamated without differentiation and labeled as “Russian,” and authenticity and ethnicity were devalued in favor of assimilating to Western practice. These reforms had profound and long-lasting implications. By the end of the nineteenth century, Western fashion was widely accepted as the modern and cosmopolitan mode of dress in Russia, catalyzing both a vibrant import enterprise and a growing clothing industry within the country. At the same time, the preservation of traditional Russian dress—and the styles, colors, and embroideries that defined it—was relegated almost completely to the peasantry.10 Peasant dress, which was local and regional rather than international and was reliant on hand sewing and artisanal decoration rather than mass production, became a rallying point for artists and intellectuals committed to the idea of authenticity as a premise for national identity. Ethnographers and anthropologists fueled the debate by demonstrating that Russian dress traced its origins to the ancient cultures of the Tatars, Finns, and Persians, and archaeologist Vasily Prokhorov even provided evidence that Russian culture and clothing derived from the Scythian Slavs and Byzantine Greeks.11 On the broadest level, this research elevated Russian dress as the credible equal of its European counterpart; more immediately, it exposed an expanded lexicon of ornaments, motifs, and garments that could be mobilized to convey nationalist sentiment.
Interest in renewing Russian culture through a revival of peasant arts and crafts grew after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and gained momentum in the 1870s, when members of the self-named Wanderers Group began to paint evocative and realistic genre scenes of peasant life.12 Through the late nineteenth century, elements of peasant culture infiltrated architecture and the decorative arts, and a spirited effort to collect and preserve artifacts of rural Russian existence provided the raw material for a new national art.13 The so-called neonational artists who took up this cause aimed not simply to preserve tradition but also to advance a modern aesthetic rooted in the past and reliant on the use of folk materials and peasant motifs. Two artists’ colonies—at Abramtsevo in the countryside outside of Moscow and at Talashkino in the central region of Smolensk—served as major centers for these activities.14 Abramtsevo, which had a long history as an artists’ retreat, was acquired by railroad magnate Savva Mamontov (1841–1918) in 1870 and gained renown for its theatrical workshop and its industrial arts and furniture making, which had a special focus on medieval tradition. Talashkino was founded in 1893 by Princess Maria Tenisheva (1867–1928) as a kind of riposte to Mamontov’s enterprise, which she dismissed as “monotonous and lacking in imagination.”15 Her school and workshops provided training in textile design, embroidery, and the decorative arts, as well as instruction in painting, drawing, and sculpture. Theatrical productions of traditional Russian works were a staple on the property, as were musical performances featuring balalaikas and other native instruments built on-site. From the 1890s until 1905, when the school and workshop were at their peak, Tenisheva welcomed a steady stream of artists who came to use her collections and teach in her ateliers, including Diaghilev, Léon Bakst, Alexandre Benois, and Igor Stravinsky. Nikolai Roerich (who would later collaborate with Stravinsky on Le sacre du printemps) was resident for years and created a set of intricate mosaics for Talashkino’s neo-Russian church, which was designed and built between 1912 and 1914.
Tenisheva, Russia’s self-described “mother of decadence,”16 became famous in Paris in 1900 when she served as the de facto organizer of the Russian displays at the Exposition Universelle, the great fair held in the city center from April to November in celebration of the new century. The extensive Russian section was housed in a massive kremlin built on the grounds of the Trocadéro and in seven other major pavilions, as well as in a reconstructed rural village complete with imported workers and artisans. In 1906 Tenisheva moved to the French capital and the following year was the subject of two lengthy articles in one of the leading French women’s magazines of the day, Femina. The first of these pieces, which appeared in April 1907, highlighted her collection of traditional kokochnik headdresses; author Charles de Danilowitch, an authority on French folk art, cited both her devotion to the “cult of ancient art” and her influence on “Russia’s modern artistic evolution,” describing her Talashkino ateliers as a “nursery” where “peasant artists, continuing the tradition of their elders, are regenerating Russian art, giving it an original and distinctive direction, relying on the very pure sources of inspiration from the popular arts.”17 The second, an extensive illustrated profile, included a sneak preview of her lavish art collection, which included over six thousand pieces ranging from sixteenth-century icons to nineteenth-century costumes. According to Femina’s critic Maurice Guillemot, Tenisheva’s pieces were a “real revelation,” and many objects in the collection were displayed at the Louvre in 1907 as part of the exhibition L’art décoratif russe.18 Tenisheva’s participation in the show was widely noted, and Femina’s readers were treated to an especially complex and layered portrait of the smock-clad artist; also a patron, collector, elegant member of high society, and animator of a new school of Russian talents, she emerged on the magazine’s pages as a one-woman embodiment of Franco-Russian cultural rapprochement (Figure 6.3).
Tenisheva’s appearance in Femina gave her visibility before a key audience of upscale and fashion-conscious women. One of the most innovative publications to emerge in the early twentieth century, the magazine was founded in 1901 and directed to an affluent readership with the means to afford an annual subscription at a cost of twelve francs, or roughly twice that of competing publications. Steering away from housekeeping and domestic fare, it focused instead on social, cultural, and political matters—or, as the masthead advertised, “Elegance, Society, Fashion, ‘Le Home,’ Theater, Sport, Music, Literature, and Arts”—and addressed itself to “the real woman, the French woman raised in the best traditions of elegance, bon ton, and grace.”19 The bimonthly journal distinguished itself through a pioneering use of photojournalism and a lively mix of cultural reports, fashion updates, and society news, all conveyed in a high-minded tone and luxurious format; its circulation reached 135,000 by 1905, putting it in the same league with the popular daily newspaper L’echo de Paris.20 While the magazine’s contributions to Diaghilev’s success in Paris have not previously been considered, it is clear that Femina paved the way for the Russians by promoting a Franco-Russian alliance formed in the feminine sphere and premised on style and fashionability, as well as social rank and political orientation.
Figure 6.3. Ilya Repin, Portrait of Princess Maria Tenisheva, 1896. Isaak Izrailevich Brodsky Flat Museum, St. Petersburg.
The magazine signaled its fascination with France’s “sister nation” on the cover of its first issue, dated February 1901, which featured a full-page photograph of Tsarina Alexandra in full regalia.21 Other profiles of the Russian royals followed, and a feature on Alexandra noted that she had not simply cultivated French customs and conventions but indeed was French, since as a member of the Hesse line, she was a direct descendant of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, whose daughter had married the duc de Brabant, prince of Lorraine, in the thirteenth century.22 The magazine published articles about other prominent Russian women, typically emphasizing the interests they shared with their French counterparts; for example, an illustrated report on the 1906 Paris visit of Madame Mouromtzoff, wife of the president of the Duma, included photographs of her daughter playing both balalaika and piano, thus symbolically crossing the Franco-Russian musical divide. The following January the magazine’s cover girl was Madame Makaroff, the widow of a Russian admiral and one of the most prominent members of Parisian expatriate society. In spite of her well-known and au courant wardrobe, she was shown wearing the “national costume” of a traditional sarafan robe and kokochnick headdress (Figure 6.4).23 In short, by the time Tenisheva appeared in the magazine in 1907, Femina had attuned its readers to particular aspects of Russian culture and promoted the notion that the nation’s deep ties to France existed on both artistic and social levels.
The 1907 exhibition at the Louvre that featured items from Tenisheva’s collection was part of a spate of events in the French capital that year showcasing Russian culture, and it followed on the heels of Diaghilev’s first major endeavor in Paris, the display he billed as Two Centuries of Russian Art. Mounted in conjunction with the Salon d’Automne in 1906, the show included over 750 pieces, ranging from medieval icons and Neoclassical paintings to woodcuts by contemporary artists, and demonstrated that Russian art was both deeply grounded in native traditions and animated by Western aesthetic ideals. The choice to exhibit at the Salon d’Automne, an alternative to the conservative, state-sanctioned Salon held every spring, was telling; founded in 1903, this exhibition had by 1906 established a reputation for its presentation of avant-garde works, including post-Impressionist paintings by Paul Gauguin and the Fauvist compositions of Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Georges Rouault. Perceived by audiences and critics alike as part of the same modernist current, Diaghilev’s Russian display was a triumph that brought him into contact with le tout Paris and set the stage for the linkage of his artistic enterprises to the wider world of style. “Diaghilev is now whirling amid the highest society,” Tenisheva wrote to Roerich with a hint of disdain in the exhibit’s aftermath; “he is received with honor at our embassies.”24 Parisian critics responded with enthusiasm to Diaghilev’s endeavor, eagerly pointing out the French roots of Russian culture. Camille Mauclair, writing in Art et décoration, offered a typical assessment, declaring the exhibition a “tasteful presentation” of paintings, tapestries, sculptures, and other objects on display, all of which not only had a lineage that traced back to Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and other eighteenth-century artists but also attested to the fact that the “lessons of Impressionism were well understood in Russia.”25 Diaghilev, who understood the value of this Franco-Russian relationship, emphasized precisely these connections in the program book for the exhibit.
Figure 6.4. Madame Makaroff. Femina, 1 January 1907 (cover).
Buoyed by this success, Diaghilev mounted a musical series he billed as Cinq Concerts Historiques Russes in Paris in 1907, presenting a repertoire largely unfamiliar to French audiences but featuring a roster of performers already famous in western Europe, including pianists Sergei Rachmaninoff and Josef Hofmann and composers Alexander Glazunov and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Venue and timing were carefully calculated to cement Diaghilev’s rapport with fashionable audiences; held at the Opéra from 16 to 20 May, the programs were a high point of the glittering pleine saison in Paris, a fixed period on the social calendar extending from May until the end of June during which the upper class customarily enjoyed a round of gala performances, grand parties, costume balls, and horse racing before leaving the city for their summer retreats. Productions arranged and overseen by Diaghilev now became part of the festivities. “Literally the whole ‘Faubourg’ could be found in the loges of the belle étage,” Diaghilev bragged in an interview about the concerts that June for a St. Petersburg newspaper, referring to the tony neighborhood of the sixteenth arrondissement that was home to most of the social elite.26 It was the beginning of a relationship with this audience that would last for two decades, and it hinged in no small part on the yoking of his Russian enterprise to an already thriving culture of style in the French capital.
A year later, Diaghilev’s activities blossomed into what Femina described as the “Saison Russe à Paris.” Held at the same time in May and immediately the high point of the pleine saison, these performances culminated in Diaghilev’s production (in the Rimsky-Korsakov version) of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov at the Opéra in late May 1908. The opera was carefully chosen; as Richard Taruskin has observed, it was an established “darling of Paris tastemakers” known in the city from at least 1875, when Camille Saint-Saëns returned from Russia with a copy of the vocal score. The new production, Diaghilev insisted, had to be “staged in such a way as to drive the French wild with its grandeur”; thus, there were opulent costumes, lavish décors, and a massive number of extras in the crowd scenes—as many as three hundred in the famous Coronation scene.27 Authenticity was a priority; Serge Lifar later recalled that Diaghilev “wanted to present a true reconstitution of Russia at the end of the 16th century” and to that end “traversed the countryside from top to bottom looking for historical clothing, old sarafans, ropes of pearls, and embroideries.”28 His acquisitions, supplemented by pieces borrowed from Tenisheva’s collections, inspired the costumes created by Alexandre Golovin, which included a dramatic and lavishly embroidered robe for the main character (Figure 6.5) along with a host of other traditional garments. Femina’s enthusiastic review by Reynaldo Hahn, who would later compose the score for Diaghilev’s ballet Le dieu bleu, remarked on the production’s “extraordinary success,” which, he argued, was simply proof that “after all, the public can tell the difference between something bad and something good.”29
Figure 6.5. Feodor Chaliapin in the role of Boris Godunov. Le théâtre, July 1908 (cover).
When Diaghilev returned to Paris in the spring of 1909, the bill included two ballet works on Russian themes: the suite of dances bundled as the divertissement Le festin, and the Polovtsian Dances from Borodin’s Prince Igor. Though hardly the most celebrated work of the season, Le festin was perhaps the most important, since it included the kernel of the work that would come to be recognized as the first quintessentially Russian production of the Ballets Russes: L’oiseau de feu, or The Firebird. Le festin originated of necessity: Diaghilev had planned a season of opera excerpts for Paris in 1909, but financial backing fell through, and he scrambled to assemble a less costly program of ballet, creating a pastiche of brief divertissements drawn from popular ballets already in the Russian repertoire. Among these was the famous pas de deux for Bluebeard and Princess Florine from the 1890 production of The Sleeping Beauty, with music by Tchaikovsky and choreography by Petipa. While the original score and dance steps were preserved in Le festin, the characters were altered and the roles reversed: the princess was replaced by a Hindu prince, danced at the premiere by Vaslav Nijinsky, while the Bluebird was transformed into the mythical character of the Firebird, a supernatural half-woman and half-bird creature that was a fixture in the Russian imagination. Bakst’s costume for Tamara Karsavina, who danced the role, was an exaggerated fantasy rendered in brilliantly vibrating color, and his illustration of the ensemble, which was featured on the 15 May 1909 cover of the popular magazine Comœdia illustré, served as both an emblem of the troupe’s national orientation and a herald of its exoticism (Figure 6.6).
Framed on the magazine cover by a motif from Russian folklore, Bakst’s costume design was an interpretation of the basic components of the traditional outfit worn by most Russian peasant women, which combined a chemise called a rubakha and a shorter overskirt/apron known as the poneva (Figures 6.7–6.9). These garments could be quite plain, but for holidays and other celebrations women wore special versions rendered in a mix of vividly colored and richly printed textiles that were highly decorated with “embroidery, woven strips, ribbons, glass beads, spangles, drake and peacock feathers, and goose down.”30 Bakst adapted the ensemble’s elements for dance, transforming the loose-fitting rubakha into a sleeveless, corset-like top that hewed to the body, shortening the skirt to knee length, and adding leggings rendered in a light, transparent fabric as a base layer. The costume was decorated with embroideries, jewels, and pearls; deep green and red fabrics were enlivened with yellow and orange prints and gold threads. Accessories included an assortment of opulent brooches, dangling bracelets, multiple rings, and a large bejeweled arm band, all topped by a towering golden headdress modeled on the traditional kokoshnik and decorated with feathers and fringe that extended over the Firebird’s back to suggest wings. This virtuosic reinterpretation of peasant dress signaled a larger artistic gambit, as Diaghilev inflected one of the iconic works of classical dance repertoire with Russian sensibilities, thus transforming an ancien régime fable into an exotic imagining of Slavic sorcery. When Diaghilev presented a full-length ballet on the Firebird theme the following year, the costume was updated, but the fundamental elements remained the same, and Russian peasant dress remained the foundation of its fantasy.
Figure 6.6. Saison Russe program. Comœdia illustré, 15 May 1909 (cover).
Figure 6.7. Russian peasant woman, ca. 1918. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Figure 6.8. Russian peasant couple, ca. 1890. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Figure 6.9. Léon Bakst, costume design for L’oiseau de feu, 1910. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York.
Figure 6.10 a–b. Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1900, Porte Binet, with close-up of Jeanne Paquin. From Le panorama: Exposition Universelle 1900 (Paris: Baschet, 1900).
In the world of haute couture, Russian themes were carried forward from Redfern to the designer Jeanne Paquin. All but forgotten now, Paquin was world renowned in 1900, when she held the powerful post of head of the Exposition Universelle’s Fashion Section. At that time, her status was so elevated that the huge statue of La Parisienne looming over the Porte Binet entry to the fair was made in her likeness, and in 1913 she became the first woman in the couture industry to be recognized as a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur (Figure 6.10). A regular in the audience for Diaghilev’s Paris productions, she also attended the more intimate performances he mounted in the summer of 1912 in the seaside resort town of Deauville and, according to a New York Times report, was “making color notes all the time the Russian Ballet was performing.” These she translated into coats described by the Times as “distinctively Russian,” with “waists gathered into a wide ornamental girdle and hanging to a point at the back” (Figure 6.11).31 One illustration of a Paquin dress, published in the December 1912 issue of the luxurious French high-style magazine La gazette du bon ton, reveals a more subtle translation of Russian themes: the long black velvet skirt hews close to the body, a full overskirt covers the hips, and a pleated blouse can be glimpsed underneath the short coat, which is done in a vividly colored and boldly patterned fabric and lavishly trimmed with fur (Figure 6.12).
Figure 6.11. Photograph of Jeanne Paquin at work, 1912. Femina, 15 June 1912, 30.
Figure 6.12. Georges Barbier, “La belle aux moineaux.” La gazette du bon ton, December 1912.
Figure 6.13. “The Bakst-Paquin Combination.” Vogue (New York), 15 June 1912, 29.
Figure 6.14. Mlle Schollar, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Tamara Karsavina in Jeux, 1913. Engraving by Valentine Gross. Reproduced in Comœdia illustré, 5 June 1913. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo credit: Gianni Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, New York.
In 1912 Paquin forged an unusual artistic collaboration by partnering with Bakst to create an upscale, but commercial, line of dresses (Figure 6.13). “The inevitable has happened,” Vogue enthused at the time. “Léon Bakst has at last designed ‘street dresses.’”32 Bakst provided the sketches, Paquin executed the designs, and the gowns quickly became the talk of fashionable Paris. Comœdia illustré’s critic proclaimed them to be “essentially modern . . . with their straight lines, precise and pure . . . their colors and their supreme distinction.” This, the magazine argued, was an antidote to what it called “tired Orientalism, inadequate to our taste for modernism and French style.”33 Modernism and French style were the watchwords for another breakthrough collaboration embarked on by Bakst and Paquin that year, namely, their work on costumes for Claude Debussy’s ballet Jeux, in which the story of a love triangle is conveyed allegorically as a tennis match (Figure 6.14). The first couturière to work with the Ballets Russes, Paquin designed simple and forward-looking versions of contemporary white sportswear for the ballet, earning critical acclaim; Valentine Gross, writing in Comœdia illustré, proclaimed the work as “the dawn of a completely new art” with a “modern tone.”34
Jeux had its premiere on 15 May 1913, but its impact was blunted by the premiere of Le sacre du printemps, which followed within a fortnight. A reconsideration of the Bakst/Paquin collaboration on Jeux, however, provides an opportunity to recontextualize the Russian “look” of Le sacre and to examine the ways in which Roerich’s costumes helped to advance the idea that Western modernism had an ancient Russian heritage. This, admittedly, seems counterintuitive, since Roerich’s costumes for Le sacre appear on the surface more attuned to exotic excess than to the simple and streamlined aesthetic of Jeux (Figure 6.15). The critic Adolphe Boschot took the more typical view in his review of the premiere: “Imagine people tricked out in the most garish colors,” he wrote, describing the “pointed bonnets and bathrobes, animal skins, or purple tunics” worn by the dancers.35 But Cyril Beaumont, reviewing the same performance, seized on the simplicity of the costumes: “The women wore simple smocks decorated at the hem with bands of simple designs in color,” he wrote; “their hair was twisted into long straggling pigtails; their cheeks were daubed with red.”36 Posed photographs of the costumed dancers from Le sacre, which appeared in Comœdia illustré, Femina, Vogue, and many other style magazines, included images of the young women as they appeared in the first tableau, with heads bent at an angle into cradled arms (Figure 6.16). While this black-and-white photo provides only a hint of the decoration and color of the costumes, it reveals that while the costumes for Le sacre were one-piece garments made of a single long, tubular piece, they embedded the components of traditional peasant dress, the rubakha chemise and poneva apron; these elements are subtly articulated in the organization of the fabric into a series of printed colored bands, each defined by a contrasting geometric pattern. The accessories that were foregrounded in L’oiseau de feu costume were eschewed in Le sacre in favor of simpler accents: long sleeves that recalled the peasant practice of sewing in extra lengths of fabric that could be pulled over the hands in colder weather, and leather belts that served as anchors for traditional amulets and charms. Color illustrations of the costumes, done by artist André Marty and published in the Gazette du bon ton’s review of the 1913 Saison Russe, offer another perspective by highlighting the uniformity of the designs and the color palette of bright accents on a neutral ground.
Figure 6.15. Nicholas Roerich, costume design for Le sacre du printemps, 1913. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.
Figure 6.16. Members of the Ballets Russes de Diaghilev dance in the Paris production of The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), 1913 (black-and-white photo). English photographer, twentieth century / private collection / Roger-Viollet, Paris / Bridgeman Images.
Roerich’s reinterpretation of traditional Russian dress, with an emphasis on minimalist form and decoration through patterning rather than embellishment, resonated in mainstream women’s fashion, although it took some time for this to happen, as the war brought a halt to activity in the fashion industry. When new dress designs that drew on Russian tradition appeared on the scene, they were the work of neither Bakst nor Paquin but rather of the artist who overshadowed them both: Coco Chanel, who was in the audience for the premiere of Le sacre in 1913 and who provided Diaghilev with the financing he needed to revive the work in a new production in 1920. While it is clear that she was personally motivated to support that initiative (in part because she was in a romantic relationship with Stravinsky at that time), there is no evidence that she was involved in the costume design. She did, however, create costumes for the 1924 production of Le train bleu, which, like Jeux, is a tale focused on contemporary sports and costumed in modern dress. After the war, she, like Diaghilev, emphasized Russo-European ties in her work, thus aligning herself with the attitudes, aesthetics, and political realities of early 1920s Paris. This was a calculated move for both impresario and couturière. Diaghilev’s postwar audience, which included many Chanel clients, was reconfigured by the many Russian émigrés who had been displaced in the course of the conflict and the Revolution and by Parisians sympathetic to their plight. Slavic style was the rage, and Chanel was at its forefront, entering what her biographer Edmonde Charles-Roux called a “Russian phase.” She added fur coats to her collections, used more ornate fabrics in bolder colors, and established a special embroidery workshop to create embellishments for her simply cut sheath dresses (Figure 6.17). She even introduced her own version of the “roubachka,” the French form of the Russian word rubakha, or “shirt,” which, Vogue reported, quickly became “the uniform of Parisiennes” (Figure 6.18).37 The Russian influence went beyond the designs to the presentation of new fashions; “pretty émigrés, all impoverished and uprooted,” according to one biographer, took jobs at Chanel’s atelier, where “the salesgirls and the mannequins spoke Russian to one another.”38 Among this group, in fact, was Stravinsky’s niece, Irina Belyakin, who at the age of nineteen adopted the name Ira Belline and became one of Chanel’s regular models.
Figure 6.17. Coco Chanel, evening dress, ca. 1926. © The Museum at FIT.
Figure 6.18. Reinaldo Luza, illustration of a Chanel dress. Vogue (New York), 1922.
With the 1923 production of Les noces, the Ballets Russes met contemporary fashion on new ground. Announced as a “new and specifically Russian type of spectacle,” the work featured costumes of “the utmost simplicity” created by Natalia Goncharova (Figure 6.19).39 These garments, which went through many rounds of redesign, were in the final iteration an extremely stripped-down and severe version of the rubakha and poneva, reinterpreted as more up-to-date brown pinafores and white blouses. Vogue acclaimed the work as a “formidable success,” noting the severity and rigor of the costumes as an architectural achievement.40 The costumes indeed heralded a different direction for fashion, away from embellishment, as presented in L’oiseau de feu, and toward austerity, as portended by The Rite. Chanel herself led the move to this new look, advancing a style based on stripped-down simplicity and uniformity. Chanel proposed standardization and repetition, exemplified in her “little black dress” (Figure 6.20), to the extent that not even the color would set one iteration of a design apart from the next. Registering this “assembly-line” approach, Vogue likened the dress to the latest developments in the industrial world, describing it as a “Ford signed Chanel.”41 This was in keeping with Goncharova’s simple adaptation of the rubakha and poneva, and in this regard, the performances of Les noces marked a critical point in the development of a modernist aesthetic dependent on interactions of art and fashion, a moment of deep correspondence that did not simply reinforce or reflect existing relationships but created new possibilities and illuminated previously unforeseen affinities in both spheres.
Figure 6.19. Natalia Goncharova, costume for Les noces, 1923. Vogue (Paris), 1 August 1923, 16. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
Figure 6.20. Gabrielle Chanel, the “Ford signed Chanel.” Vogue (New York), 1 October 1926, 69.
Thus, from L’oiseau de feu to Les noces, we observe a shift in Diaghilev’s presentations of Russia, in which opulence and fantasy give way to austerity. The treatment of the elements of peasant costume by Diaghilev’s designers signals this change: the supercharged rubakha and poneva barely recognizable in L’oiseau de feu of 1910 become the chaste pinafore of the subdued bride in 1923. The Rite of Spring is a key point in this evolution, the moment at which, strangely enough, the modernism of contemporary fashion and the stylization of the archaic world begin to align and set the stage for a convergence that would dominate style in the 1920s and beyond. At stake was the emergence of a new set of ideals—simplicity, balance, and repetition—qualities generally encompassed under the label “Neoclassical.” We can make progress toward understanding some of the dynamics at work by looking through the lens of fashion, which, among other things, illuminates the ways in which the peasant wedding of Les noces and Chanel’s little black dress participated in a larger project of modernism; reveals that Paquin, in her rejection of the Oriental and embrace of more subdued, Russian-inflected styles, was in the vanguard of this shift; and demonstrates that Diaghilev and his troupe did not create a fashion revolution in a vacuum but rather entered an ongoing dialogue about dress, Russian identity, and the contemporary world. In 1976 Yves Saint Laurent joined the discussion, ironically moving from the simplicity of the black pantsuit to the exuberance of an imagined Russia, only to find himself heralded as a fashion modernist.
1. On Saint Laurent, see Drake, The Beautiful Fall.
2. Saint Laurent’s statement for Le Figaro appears in “Obituary: Yves Saint Laurent.”
3. Morris, “Diaghilev Inspires Saint Laurent.”
4. “Saint Laurent: The Romance.”
5. Morris, “Diaghilev Inspires Saint Laurent.”
6. D.F., “Redfern Gowns Galore.”
7. “The Best Paris Gowns.”
8. New York Times, 19 January 1916, quoted in Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:518.
9. Ruane, The Empire’s New Clothes, 1.
10. Ibid., 8.
11. Ibid., 158.
12. On the Wanderers, see Brooks, “The Russian Nation Imagined.”
13. Salmond, “A Matter of Give and Take,” 6.
14. On neonationalism at Abramtsevo and Talashkino, see Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:502–18.
15. Quoted in ibid., 1:511.
16. Ibid., 1:513.
17. Danilowitch, “Coiffes et bonnets russes.”
18. Guillemot, “Les collections.”
19. “Presentation,” 2.
20. The newspaper had a circulation of 134,000. See Berry, “Designing the Reader’s Interior,” 62.
21. Femina, 1 February 1901.
22. d’Amaville, “Sa Majésté Maria Feoforovna,” 300.
23. Femina, 1 January 1907.
24. Quoted in Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:523.
25. Mauclair, “Le Salon d’Automne,” 141.
26. Quoted in Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:528.
27. Quoted in ibid., 1:531.
28. Serge Lifar, quoted in Schouvaloff, The Art of the Ballets Russes, 306.
29. Hahn, “Notes sur des notes,” 327.
30. Matossian, “The Peasant Way of Life,” 16.
31. Rittenhouse, “What the Well-Dressed Woman Is Wearing.”
32. “The Bakst-Paquin Combination,” 29.
33. Vanina, “La comédie de la mode.”
34. Gross, “Impressions sur Jeux,” 22.
35. Boschot quoted in Kelly, First Nights, 287.
36. Beaumont quoted in ibid., 288.
37. Charles-Roux, Chanel and Her World, 131.
38. Ibid., 130.
39. Vladimir Derzhanovskii quoted in Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 2:1320.
40. “Les noces de Stravinsky ont remporté un formidable success.”
41. “The Chanel ‘Ford.’”
