Let’s continue the ballet thread that started yesterday by getting inspired by costume designer Karinska.
Born in Kharkiv, now Ukraine, the Russian Empire, Varvara Andreevna Jmoudsky (1886-1983) was better known as Barbara Karinska or simply Karinska.
She had a rich life and from Russia she moved to Berlin, then lived in Paris where she worked for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and then moved to London and started collaborating with Cecil Beaton.
When she relocated to the United States, George Balanchine gave her an unused room at the School of American Ballet in New York City for her to work (the first ballet she made for Balanchine from her own designs was "Bourrée Fantasque" in 1949).
In the '60s, Balanchine invited her to join the New York City Ballet and Karinska ended up collaborating with him on seventy-five ballets in all.
Karinska's modus operandi actually drove many crazy: despite being a workaholic, she was always late in handing out her costumes, as she was a perfectionist as well. She often finished the costumes right before the start of a show; costumes would usually arrive on the evening of the show with seamstresses in tow to do the final last-minute alterations. Legend goes that at 5pm on the opening night of Balenchine's Nutcracker, Balanchine himself and Jerome Robbins had to sit down and start stitching the costumes themselves.
Costume designers can be interesting inspirations for people working in fashion, but Karinska may be intriguing for fashion designers for different reasons. First of all, she made some historically relevant changes to tutus and ballet costumes and worked on the structure of the designs.
She layered different colours of tulle throughout the tutus to create visual depth and a sort of watercolour effect on stage, but she also launched the "powder puff" tutu (also known as the Balanchine-Karinska tutu - it first appeared in 1950 in the ballet "Symphony in C"), what is now the standard in ballet companies all over the world.
She started building the tutus on a yoke gathering multiple layers of tulle in rows beneath one another. In Karinska's tutus the base of the costume incorporate a shorter skirt made of six or seven layers of gathered net that support the other layers. Each layer is a half inch longer than the preceding layer and no wire hoop is therefore needed. Stacked together the result is fluffier compared to the stiff "pancake" tutu.
For what regards embellishments, Karinska favoured embroidery, beadwork and appliqué effects, lace motifs and crochet, materials and techniques that probably came from her training in Russian embroidery.
One of the most interesting stories about Karinska is that she used to hide details and decorative motifs in places where they wouldn't have been seen by the audience.
At times she added bows between the panty and the yoke of a tutu and embroideries even inside the garments. As they would be visible to the dancers, the wardrobe people and the makers, why would she include these details? "For the soul", she would reply to those who asked.
The truth is that those details weren't just for the soul, Karinska hoped indeed that the costumes would be displayed in public exhibitions one day. So, there are lessons to learn from Karinska's costumes and let's hope that, at some point, they will also do a film or a series based on her rather adventurous life and intriguing career as a ballet costume designer.
Image credits for this post
1. Barbara Karinska, 1960-64, The New York Public Library Digital Collections
2. New York City Ballet rehearsal room, George Balanchine and costumer Barbara Karinska looking at Nicholas Benois' sketches for "Theme and variations", choreography by George Balanchine (New York), 1970, Photograph by Martha Swope, The New York Public Library Digital Collections
3 -7. New York City Ballet - costumes by Karinska for "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (New York), 1968, Photographs by Martha Swope, The New York Public Library Digital Collections
8. Barbara Karinska, Photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1962, The New York Public Library Digital Collections
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