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Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina costume design Lev Bakst
- Lev Bakst designed sets and costumes for Sergey Diaghilev & Ballets Russes. His set designs are legendary, but he was also a courtier of high fashion. Bakst sources of inspiration for his fashion, were his own costume designs for his own projects for ballet productions, where he introduced radical conceptions of costume and design.
- See previous article on Constructivist fashion.
Lev Bakst represented the culmination of the stylization of the pre-Revolutionary period that became known as style moderne. These were the clothes designed for the haute Bourgeois in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Lev Bakst used feathers, pendants, veils and loose trousers not as mere ornament but as functional devices to expand the actions of the body itself. He was often forced to compromise his artistic intentions to a clients taste, because he wasnt using conventional clothing such as corsets, brassiere's. The clothes he designed for Ballets Russes, are significant because they influenced French high fashion, of the time and the radical Russian designers who followed.
Lev Bakst anticipated the Russian avant-garde Constructivist concept of Democratic emancipated women's clothing. Until the 1917 Revolution he was the arbiter of haute couture in Russia. Bakst was both a creator and slave to fashion, but he made some important concepts of dress design with the artist/intellectual avant-garde Liubov Popova. Liubov Popova wore men's clothing, and flouted convention. She advocated nudity, and unisex clothing, as the fashion solution to the new Revolutionary state. She saw dress reform as part of a larger socialist Revolution. Men and women dressed in unisex uniforms. See the production clothes in the slideshow, men and women dressed the same. Unisex clothes equalizes the genders. Real equality of the sexes. The Bolshevik campaign for the emancipation of women. Very radical, even for today.
Contrawise, Lev Bakst designed for only a small class of Aristocratic clientele. By 1922 people had fallen out of love with Bakst and in love with the industrial clothing, of the avant-garde Bolshevik designers. These designers like Popova were helped with the new industrial capability of the new Soviet state. Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP)of 1921 was to give them the impetus to create and produce mass quantities of industrial Democratic clothing. Clothes for sports, clothes for the factory, clothes for everyday life that were universal.The Bolsheviks steamrolled Russia from the 14th century to the 20th century, and their advanced ideas encompassed every aspect of life including fashion. Lenin encouraged radical solutions to age old problems, of exploitation, and substandard living conditions of the majority of Russians. These Russian designers promoted the same radical solutions for fashion.
What should the new Soviet women be wearing?
Well?!! The most cutting edge clothing according to these Russian Constructivist designers. In 1913 Natalia Goncharova made patterns for embroidered dresses that was purchased by Natalie Lamanova who was Moscow's most sophisticated haute couture designer in Moscow at the time.
Natalia Goncharova is now considered one of the pre-eminent avant-garde Russian painters. She alike many women Constructivist artists are finally getting recognition. Her painting "Pillars of Salt" from 1909 just sold at Christies for for 9.8 million. (It was a record for a woman artist, surpassing Georgia O'Keeffe). But she designed clothes too ( see the second pic in the slideshow, this a dress from her collection 1924).
- Olga Rosanova one of the original exponents of Suprematism, applied dynamic combinations of color planes and textiles for dresses and accessories such as purses (see the design for a purse of hers in the slideshow). Russia had the most advanced progressive views, and women were at the forefront. Lenin promoted the rights of women, and advocated full equality of the sexes, including equal pay for equal work. "Photographs of Soviet women in military uniform driving a tractor, working in a factory and laughing together float above a photo of a sexualized "flapper" flanked by two policemen, evoking the decadent bourgeois femininity and sexual violence of the West". This was the propaganda of the time. Propaganda to promote gender equality.
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