At the same time that post-Soviet models, street style stars, and designers are becoming part of fashion’s new establishment, there is a nostalgia for pre-Soviet Russia—or more correctly, a romanticized tsars-in-your-eyes idea of the vast, diverse, and now divided country. While the street-savvy, proportion-skewering Demna Gvasalia and his Vetements crew are proponents of an edgy “urban realism,” Vita Kin has found runaway success with embellished bohemian pieces that reference the traditional Ukrainian vyshyvankas. (We observed something similar happening in Seoul, where the native hanbok is being reimagined as streetwear.)
Long before Kin tapped into her heritage, Yves Saint Laurent, an outsider looking in, created his own belle Russe. His 1976 haute couture collection was an homage to Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, who, at the turn of the century, exported a fantasy of Russia to a European audience. Among Diaghilev's collaborators were Pablo Picasso, Coco Chanel, Igor Stravinsky, Pavlova, and Nijinsky. The impact of their sometimes atonal, often overtly sexual spectacles was electric and reverberated through many media, but especially fashion, and that’s thanks largely to Leon Bakst, who was the troupe’s main costume designer for close to a decade.
Bakst is remembered for popularizing exoticism through his opulent, even decadent designs. Though Bakst was a costume designer, his performance pieces greatly impacted how women dressed. Paul Poiret fell hard for the fantasies Bakst conjured. They inspired not only the Frenchman’s groundbreaking designs (e.g., his lampshade dress), but also his entertainments: In 1911, Poiret hosted an infamously OTT “The Thousand and Second Night” party. If Raf Simons’s psychedelic bodysuits for Christian Dior’s Fall 2015 collection were Bakstian, as the year advanced, the homages became more overt. In August, art entrepreneur Maria Baibakova and Adrien Faure had a Ballets Russes–themed wedding, for which Olympia Le-Tan re-created a Bakst drawing on a clutch for the bride. And in October, as Vetements was “proving its street style cred” during fashion month, Grimes took to Instagram to declare Bakst her “fave non-comic illustrator.” It must take a fantasist to know one.
Here, a look back at fashion inspired by the Ballets Russes.