pantelides k the siren mode female body image in the ballet russes an haute couture 1927-29

8/20/2019 Pantelides K the Siren Mode Female Body Image in the Ballet Russes an Haute Couture 1927-29

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The Siren Mode: Female Body Image in the Ballets Russes and

Haute Couture c.1927- 1929

Katerina Pantelides

From 1920-1927 the gar çonne, an androgynous female icon dominated Paris

fashion and Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, as a boyish silhouette and youthful,

unsophisticated mannerisms were promoted by fashion arbiters and the Russian

émigré ballet company alike. However, during the late 1920s, the gar çonne gave

way to more traditional visions of femininity. Couturiers, most notably Madeleine

Vionnet, pioneered complex garment constructions that alternately clung to and

flowed from the body, thus exaggerating its feminine form, while Diaghilev’s ballets began to feature chimerical sirens and goddesses whose appearance and

reality were discordant. Whereas in the early 1920s woman was envisioned as

playful and childishly straight-forward, from about 1927 gender difference was

accentuated as women from both the spheres of fashion and ballet began to be

portrayed as seductive, fascinating and remote.

My paper seeks to explore the relationship ballet and fashion in the late 1920s

through this supremely feminine and mysterious siren figure. It will firstly considerhow and why the siren evolved from the gar çonne and eventually replaced her, and

will then compare evocations of siren-like femininity in ballet and fashion. It will

particularly address the parallels between the couturier Vionnet and the

choreographer George Balanchine’s revelation and stylisation of the female body.

The influence of the Neoclassical and Modernist artistic movements will be

evaluated alongside the ballet dancers’ prolonged exile from Russia, as the paper

examines why woman was mythologised as a muse and seductress during this

period.

Key Words: Balanchine, ballet, bias-cut, classicism, body, dance, essential,

femininity, light, movement, shadow, siren, Vionnet

This paper examines manifestations of siren-like femininity in Sergei

Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (a prominent Russian émigré ballet

company) and Parisian haute couture between 1927 and 1929.i In theearly to mid 1920s, the gar çonne, an androgynous female icon


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dominated both disciplines; however around 1927 notions of

essential femininity based upon the body’s appeal and the legendary

feminine enigma prevailed. Couturiers, most notably Madeleine

Vionnet, pioneered complex garment constructions that alternately

revealed and transformed the body in motion, while Diaghilev’s ballets began to feature chimerical sirens and goddesses whose

appearance and reality were discordant.

In both ballet and fashion, these enigmatic manifestations referenced

Freud’s discussion of the feminine ‘riddle’.ii Freud, who

acknowledged the patriarchal psychoanalytic discipline’s limitedknowledge of femininity hypothesised that women’s sexuality was

largely narcissistic owing to ‘the effect of penis-envy’ whereby

females attempted to compensate for ‘their original sexual

inferiority’ by accentuating their physical charms. Women then, were

more inclined to court admiration and become objects rather than

subjects of love. Freud’s continued emphasis on feminine mystery

and narcissism promoted a generalised conception of woman that

objectified her and exaggerated her difference from man. Simone deBeauvoir analysed this notion of woman as an Othering fantasy,

writing that: ‘the dream incarnated is precisely woman; she is the

wished for intermediary between nature the stranger to man, and the

fellow being who is too closely identical.’iii

Arguably, as a dream

positioned between nature and humanity, woman is a mythologised

entity, to be discovered and defined by man, even, paradoxically,

when she is cast as unknowable. In Classical mythology, the Sirens,

woman and bird hybrids who combed their hair on the rocks and

lured sailors to their deaths by singing sweetly, became such

emblems of chimerical femininity.iv Though the sirens were defined

by their alluring physicality, it was their activity (their magnetic

song), that rendered them seductive objects and seducing subjects

simultaneously. Comparably, the dancers and style arbiters who

displayed sirenic body image occupied a liminal position between

objectification and subjectivity as they appealed to the (often male)


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spectator’s gaze, but simultaneously expressed their difference from

conventional notions of feminine passivity.

The paper addresses sirenic body image in the Russian émigréchoreographer George Balanchine’s ballets La Chatte (1927), Apollo

(1928) and Prodigal Son (1929) alongside parallel developments inhaute couture. It will adopt the psychoanalyst Paul Schilder’s

definition of body image as the ‘tri-dimensional image which

everybody has about himself ’.v This notion incorporated both the

body’s appearance and an individual’s multi-sensory corporeal

experience. For Schilder, who was writing in the context of the 1930sutopian belief in bodily improvement through physical exercise, the

body’s postural model was ‘in perpetual inner self -construction and

self-destruction’ and therefore aligned to fluctuating notions of

personal and interpersonal identity.vi

Schilder’s conception of

constant adaptation in body image and identity is especially pertinent

for discussing women’s external appearances and personal

experiences within the transitioning disciplines of dance and fashion.

There were elements of the siren’s Otherness within representations

of post-armistice new women prior to 1927, both in fashion and in

the Ballets Russes, as an equivocal approach to gender and sexuality

reflected the ambiguity of post-armistice feminine identity. Rebecca

Arnold notes how ‘as gender roles altered under the impact of the

First World War, women needed to renegotiate their relationship to

public spaces; no longer closeted, literally within the domestic

sphere, or metaphorically by restrictive clothing or rigid moral codes,younger women sought the means to signal this change’.

vii Young,

metropolitan women achieved this alteration sartorially through an

uncorseted silhouette that revealed the natural body’s outlines. Yet as

Coco Chanel, one instigator of these changes declared, this new

woman became ‘a caterpillar by day and a butterfly by night.

Nothing could be more comfortable than a caterpillar and nothing

more made for love than a butterfly’.viii

Such dualism was reflected

in haute couture from the early to middle 1920s. Daywear utilised

masculine fabrics and the simplified cuts of sportswear, thus


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accommodating women’s active pursuits, while eveningwear was

often made from lightweight, lustrous fabrics and embellished with

fringing, beading and feathers. Eveningwear then, revealed the new

erogenous zones of back and limbs, and created wing-like

dimensions around the wearer’s body that exaggerated genderdifference and rendered women spectacular entities. As Liz Conor

has identified, during the 1920s women’s bodies were exposed on

stage, in the media and on screen to an unprecedented degree.

According to Conor the flapper, who epitomised the mid-1920s

butterfly, courted a ‘specifically’ male gaze in asserting ‘her

modernity as a sexual subject by paradoxically constituting herself asan object within the new conditions of feminine visibility.’

ix Like the

Classical siren, the flapper actively portrayed herself as a seducing

object in combining the new woman’s masculine agency with the

coquette’s attention-seeking exterior.

Plural manifestations of femininity also infiltrated the Ballets Russes

in the 1920s. On the one hand, Diaghilev aligned his company’s

aesthetic to modernity, and from 1920 onwards had sought Chanel’sadvice in costuming his female dancers, who in turn adopted a lean,

streamlined silhouette both on and off stage.x However, as Russian

émigrés and ballet dancers, Diaghilev’s women equally embodied

multiple Othering qualities. As the artist Edgar Degas summarised,

ballerinas were perceived as ‘Queens... made of distance and

greasepaint’, in other words, supremely feminine creatures who

moved in an ethereal, non-pedestrian manner and inhabited a

shadowy theatrical realm.xi By the mid-1920s the Ballets Russes

dancers’ professionalism had to some extent redressed stereotypes

that equated female dancers with courtesans. However, an aura of

sexual provocation still surrounded female stage performers, given

their dualistic identities which comprised public-facing and private

elements. Moreover, Russian ballet dancers possessed additional

layers of difference because they were expatriates who had been

severed from their native Russia and its Imperial ballet tradition afterthe1917 Bolshevik Revolution and on a further level embodied


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Diaghilev’s iconoclastic productions where they appeared in

numerous costumed guises. Subsequently, these ethnically displaced,

performing women’s liminality meant that they became easily

associated with notions of enigmatic femininity.

The year 1927, marked a peaked interest in the sirenic femininity thatwas beginning to displace the garconne mode in the Ballets Russes

and Paris fashion. That year George Balanchine, who had emigrated

from Bolshevik Russia in 1924 and had subsequently proven his

choreographic talent to Diaghilev, became the company’s dominant

choreographer and was permitted greater artistic control over hiswork. From the outset of his choreographic career Balanchine had

found his greatest inspiration in his female dancers. According to

Yuri Slonimsky, Balanchine’s peer at the State Academic Theatre in

Petrograd, the young choreographer ‘searched tirelessly for a girl

with talent who would inspire him in turn to affirm the beauty of a

dance created in honour of his love and in admiration of her gifts’.xii

This emphasis on admiration or love from a distance indicates

Balanchine’s desire to reveal the dancer’s embodied talent throughhis choreography, whilst simultaneously incorporating her into his

scheme of distant, idealised beauty. This was apparent in La Chatte,

a ballet based on Aesop’s fable about a cat who is transformed into a

woman when a young man wishes for it, and then resumes her feline

form when tempted by a passing mouse, causing the youth to expire

from grief. xiii

La Chatte’s eponymous protagonist embodied this

distant, mercurial model of femininity in becoming an elemental

construct of light and movement in the Russian Constructivist

designer Naum Gabo’s experiment with the ‘dynamic potential of

form in space’. xiv

Gabo’s elaborate set featured mobile constructions

made from transparent plastics against a black background. The

costumes which ‘were contrived as moving entities so that when the

dancers performed their steps, the light would catch the edge of the

plastic or cause reflections to shimmer on its surface’ similarly

formed part of the luminous, kinetic set.xv

Thus illuminated withmobile reflections, the cat would have imbued a multi-dimensional,


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inhuman yet attractively lustrous body image. Balanchine’s

choreography which the Ballets Russes ballet-master Sergei

Grigoriev noted was ‘... full of invention, particularly as regards its

poses, which were highly sculptural’ aided this impression of

perpetually mobile, transparent volumes.xvi

Alice Nikitina, whodanced the cat in the ballet’s Paris premiere found that Balanchine’s

choreography and Henri Sauget’s music ‘inspired me remarkably and

I was in such harmony with the fairylike background of transparent,

colourless creations’.xvii

In the ballet’s publicity photographs,

Nikitina externalised her continuously fluid experience as she

assumed the choreography’s plastic folds which harmonised with theset and her resistant illuminated costume. (image 1 ) Nikitina’s

costumed integration into the dance destabilised her body’s

boundaries and thereby emphasised the cat’s chimerical character.

While her body image disrupted notions of fixed femininity, its

combined intangibility and feline coyness was gendered feminine in

evoking Freud’s conception of feminine mystery and self -absorption.

In 1927, Parisian couturiers also began to develop a new female bodyimage based upon cinematic movement and feminine seductiveness

after a period of perceived creative stagnation.xviii

A 1927 article by

the couturier Lucien Lelong for the periodical L’Officiel de la

couture et la mode described how ‘la ligne kinetique’ was designed

with La Chatte’s preoccupations of transparency and sculptural

movement in mind: ‘la ligne est kinetique et l’effet optique s’obtient

par le traitement des différents parties de la silhouette’.xix

Though

dress designs increasingly featured gatherings, cascades and panels

that permitted a temporary fullness in motion, the overall effect was

‘simple in appearance, but concealing a complex and logical cut’.xx

In 1928 L’Officiel described one printed Chanel chiffon dress with a

triple flounced skirt and free-floating panels of irregular length as ‘an

immaterial thing, fairylike and extremely simple, but studied in such

a way that the line of the woman who wears it, is made the best

of’.xxi

(image 2) The dress was paradoxically revealing andillusionist: in the manner of La Chatte’s transparent yet intricately


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constructed costumes, the immaterial garment purported to expose

the figure but simultaneously deceived the eye about its true shape

through a complex network of panels. Arguably, the dress’s

construction diverted attention away from the wearer’s natural body

and onto her stylised dressed body, which demonstrated thecouturier’s craft and implied the woman’s consciously discerning

self-presentation. Moreover, the wearer’s body image would appear

different from varying angles and transform in motion, thus

rendering her like Nikitina in La Chatte, a mobile sculpture, who

usurped her static corporeal boundaries. This aesthetic conceived of

a woman who was paradoxically as simple and direct as light, andyet a composite of illusionistic devices. The female body, and

perhaps by extension the woman inside it, like La Chatte’s hybrid

cat, was portrayed as equivocal.

This paradoxical femininity was further developed in Balanchine’s

1928 ballet Apollo and Vionnet’s bias-cut dresses as both pursued a

body image that married classical sculpture’s universalising ideals

and the individual body’s movement. Balanchine and Vionnet’sinnovations were conceived during the period of fine and decorative

art’s renewed interest in classicism. Around 1927 artists including

Picasso and Giorgio de Chirico responded to the Cubist and Futurist

movements’ experiments with fragmentation and abstraction by

exploring how Classicism’s unifying principles could redefine

modern experience. Arnold argues that Classicism in relation to dress

‘presents a facade of effortlessness... It is revered within Western

culture as an emblem of simple, natural truths, the beauty of

geometric forms draped upon supple flesh, yet it takes considerable

skill to create and wear’.xxii

Here, Arnold’s emphasis on the

conscious artistry behind the classical aesthetic’s apparent

essentialism is important, as it indicates that though women who

adopted a neoclassical body image could appear impenetrable, their

realisation of this ideal relied upon careful and regular adaptations to

their dress, body posture and mannerisms.


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In Balanchine’s Apollo, where the Muses of poetry (Calliope), mime,

(Polyhymnia) and dance (Terpischore) competed for the Music god’s

favour it was Terpsichore’s ability to present a persuasive

classicising body image that marked her chosen status.xxiii The

ballet’s composer Stravinsky, viewed that Terpsichore’s persuasionconsisted of ‘combining in herself both the rhythm of poetry and the

eloquence of gesture’, and thereby ‘reveal(ing) dancing to the

world’.xxiv

This revelation of dancing, an art which welds the body’s

living solidity to choreography’s intangibility denotes a marriage

between the dancer’s imminent appeal and the univer salising

aesthetic of classical art. This was enhanced by the ballet’schoreography, which featured frieze-like compositions in perpetual

motion and thereby oscillated between art’s stillness and dance’s

movement.xxv

Balanchine, whose choreographic method involved collaborating

with his dancers in ‘creat(ing) particular works for particular persons

by drawing out what is in them’, exploited the specific talents of his

first Terpsichores, Nikitina and Alexandra Danilova.xxvi

Subsequently, the dancers who both felt that Terpsichore’s

choreography fitted them like a ‘glove’ revealed highly different

body images in publicity photographs.xxvii

Whereas Nikitina is

emotionally restrained and embodies the challenging choreography

in a fluid arabesque, Danilova turns her head towards the camera and

engages the spectator ’s gaze as though to make them aware of her

status as the favoured Muse. (images 3-4) On a further level, these

photographs’ marked differences in body image attest to

Balanchine’s interest in the immediacy of individual dancers’ bodies

in movement, and the dancers’ own desires to emerge as distinctive

artists within classical ballet’s prescribed, idealised forms.

The tension between the living body and classical art in Vionnet’s

work manifested in her dual inspirations of Greek vases in ‘the

beautifully clothed women depicted on them, or even the noble lines

of the vase itself’ and the agile, uncorseted female body.xxviii Vionnet,

who disdained fashion’s ephemerality wanted haute couture to


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emulate classical art’s allegedly timeless celebration of the well-

proportioned natural body’s lines. As Pamela Golbin has observed,

Vionnet’s chief innovation to this end was to use the bias cut, which

traditionally lined bodices, for the entire garment. This caused the

fabric to alternately delineate and flow from the body’s contours,thus enabling it to gain elasticity and become a sort of ‘second skin

around a body in motion’.xxix

Like Balanchine’s glove-like

choreography Vionnet’s innovations with the bias cut enabled her to

refine and flatter her clients’ bodies in motion. This is apparent in

Cecil Beaton’s 1929 photograph of a mannequin wearing a bias-cut

pale blue crepe romain dress with a handkerchief hem and a gold bead embellishment that traverses the torso diagonally and mirrors

the bodice’s pointed hem. (image 5) The sleeveless dress imbues the

mannequin with agility: her athletically toned arms are exposed; the

diagonal gold decoration causes light to stream across her form and

the asymmetric triangular handkerchief skirt skims the curve of her

hips and anticipates a dynamic play of legs. Arnold has observed that

‘by freeing the fabric’ through such applications of the bias cut,

(Vionnet) ‘was also freeing the woman, enabling her body to berevealed and celebrated, unhampered by bourgeois notions of

modesty and decorum’.xxx

Vionnet’s dresses then, much like Apollo’s

choreography, reinvigorated classical feminine body image by

pursuing the synaesthetic trope of bodily movement and warmth

within visual clarity. This paradox evokes Michel Serres’s discussion

of Cinderella’s slipper, which in Charles Perrault’s original fairytale

was ‘vair’ (Old French for fur), but transubstantiated to ‘verre’(French for glass) in eighteenth-century variants of the tale. While

Balanchine and Vionnet strove for the transparent homogeneity of

‘verre’ in their classical bodily schemas, in reality the transformative,

contrasting forms that they grafted onto the body resembled ‘vair ’,

whose etymology lies in variety. Serres wrote that the ‘vair’ slipper

unlike its rigid ‘verre’ antecedent was ‘flexible but specific, with the

potential for all shapes but fitting one only... holding the foot firmly

but allowing it to dance’.xxxi The ‘vair ’ slipper’s contrapuntal precision and flexibility, along with its contained support of the


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wearer’s expressive foot, renders it a fitting analogue to Vionnet and

Balanchine’s creations. Thus supported and permitted to dance, the

women who inhabited these creators’ variegated constructions were

refined but encouraged to beguile and on a further level, express

themselves through their individualised bodily movements.

More overt displays of sirenic femininity manifested in ballet and

couture through notions of entrapping animalistic body image. In the

Ballets Russes this was most directly imbued in the 1929 ballet

Prodigal Son’s Siren who tempts the eponymous protagonist to

sin.

xxxii

Balanchine, the ballet’s choreographer instructed FeliaDubrovska, the dancer who played the Siren, to relinquish her

humanity by becoming a ‘snake’ who hypnotises her prey and almost

kills him.xxxiii

Dubrovska related that ‘everything was in my eyes and

in showing myself’ as her act’s power lay in executing Balanchine’s

intricately geometric choreography of folding and unfolding legs

with a steady stare.xxxiv

She described how ‘because at that time I had

lovely legs, Balanchine used that.... he asked me to lie down on the

floor on my back, just flat, and to bend my knees and then slowlykick, one leg straight, then the other....’

xxxv Balanchine further

achieved the Siren’s body image by exaggerating Dubrovska’s five-

foot six inch physique, which by contemporary standards was

strikingly tall for a female dancer, through placing the latter on

pointe and in ‘a high hat to make her appear even taller’. xxxvi

The

character’s serpentine otherness was heightened through heavy

orientalised eye make-up and the artist George Rouault’s slimming,

tight wine-red velvet bodice with darkened side panels and the web-

patterned tights that accentuated her leg length.xxxvii

A publicity

photograph by David shows an un-balletic emphasis on weight and

multiplicity. Dubrovska is on pointe and arches her back, thereby

allowing her long cape to fall in a velvet pool on the floor and her

high hat to express her head’s heaviness, while her arms, bent at the

elbow and heavily embellished with black wrist-bands end in fists.

(image 6) Her body’s multiple focal points along with the shadowthat surrounds her on all sides render her statically ominous and


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command the spectator to stop and devote his attention to her. With

her explicitly stylised, provocative appearance, Dubrovska’s Siren

embodies Freud’s conception of female vanity as compensation for

original sexual inferiority, a notion tailored to the biblical parable’s

moral.

The emphasis on shadow in Dubrovska’s body image, along with the

slow, supine, coitally suggestive aspects of her choreography which

jarred with the ballet’s otherwise accelerated tempo, evoked

seductresses in contemporary silent film. A similar exposition of

serpentine, sirenic femininity was revealed in The Woman heScorned (1929).

xxxviii In a comparable manner to Prodigal Son, a film

still foregrounds the protagonist Pola Negri’s legs, which are

suggestively folded and elongated through laddered black stockings.

(image 7) The stockings’ webbed texture recalls the painted

patternation of Doubrovska’s legs, and arguably hints at the dubious

morality of flesh revealed through thread-like textures. Oscillating

between the contraries of revelation and concealment, construction

and decadence, open, lace-like fabrics imply enchantment throughtitillation and deception. Negri’s character in the film was morally

tainted, and therefore an acceptable source of titillation. Similarly, in

being revealed and later defeated, Dubrovska’s body, much like

Negri’s symbolised bourgeois society’s simultaneous fascination and

fear of female sexuality.

Still, the magnetism of such stage and screen seductresses, whose

imagery was accessible to all who encountered it in the theatre or

press, coupled with a relaxation of sexual mores in the 1920s, meant

that adaptations of their webbed costumes filtered into the evening

wear and lingerie of middle class women. Under the umbrella of

bourgeois consumption it became socially acceptable for women to

portray elements of the femme fatale, albeit in a less overt manner

than Dubrovska and Negri. This was often achieved through lattice-

like fabrics that embodied the feminine riddle through theircontrapuntal translucency and highly-worked, intricate surfaces. A


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late 1920s black tulle sample, probably intended for an evening

gown, by the Russian émigré embroidery house Kitmir features a

pearl-embroidered diamond web-motif that recalls Dubrovska and

Negr i’s embellishments. (image 8) Here, the double webbing of tulle

and overlaid pearl pattern draw the spectator’s eye in, toward thewearer as the former is confronted with two layers of visual

illusionism. Additionally, a 1929 promotion of the Russian émigré

fashion house Annek’s airborne nightgowns trimmed with lace was

titled ‘Lingerie of Cobweb Texture’. xxxix

In its cobweb analogy the

promotion evoked not only the garments’ unparalleled lightness, but

their ability to ensnare and captivate their intended victim. (image 9)Like Dubrovska’s slowly unfolding Siren, the woman in lacy

trappings attempted to still time, by stopping the spectator in his

tracks, inciting him to look at her and become suspended in her

power. In the late1920s where as Siegfried Kracauer noted, the

working day was increasingly regulated and society’s very pastimes

appeared to mark time, sirenic bodily seduction with its ability to

disrupt quotidian chronologies, became a powerful distraction.xl

As a figure who oscillated between the contraries of avant-garde and

retrospective femininity, the siren in Ballets Russes productions and

haute couture between 1927 and 1929, evoked contemporary

society’s ambivalence towards notions of feminine agency and

sexuality. The technical innovations in choreography and couture

that simultaneously revealed and enigmatised the female body,

released its potential for movement on an unprecedented level and

challenged its relationship to subjectivity and objecthood. However,

while the siren mode served to destabilise conceptions of

universalising, static femininity, its appeal relied upon exaggerating

notions of feminine Otherness. This feminine model set a precedent

for the early 1930s. During the global Great Depression and the

economic uncertainty that accompanied it, consumers’ desire for

escapism led them to seek refuge in visions of essential yet

kinaesthetically appealing femininity that challenged quotidian,linear notions of time and space.


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Notesi Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was a famous company of travelling Russian

dancers, known for its innovation and promotion of collaboration between different

production elements. The company debuted in Paris in 1909, and after a brief

interval during the war period, remained a company in emigration until

Diaghilev’s 1929 death. ii Sigmund Freud, ‘On Femininity’ (1933). In On Freud’s Femininity, Eds. Leticia

Glocer Fiorini and Graciela Abelin-Sas Rose, (London: Karnac Books, 2010) 128.

Freud sustained this view on female narcissism over 19 years. In his 1933 essay

‘On Femininity’ he refers readers back to his 1914 text ‘On Narcissism’. iii

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex .Translated from the French by H.M

Parshley (New York : Modern Books, 1968), 182.iv In Homer’s Odessey the Sirens were the daughters of the river god Achleous and

various deities including the Muse of dance Terpsichore, the Muse of tragedy

Melpomene and the Pleiades. Odysseus instructed his men to plug their ears with

wax when sailing past the Sirens so that they would not be lured into the rocks by

their song.v Paul Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in

Constructive Energies of the Psyche (New York: International Universities PressInc., 1950), 3.vi Schilder, Image and Appearance of the Human Body, 201.

vii Rebecca Arnold, ‘Vionnet and Classicism’ in Madeleine Vionnet, 15 Dresses

from the Collection of Martin Kamer, Judith Clark Costume, 15 March – 26 April

2001, ed. Judith Clark (London: Judith Clark Costume, 2001), 3.viii

Chanel quoted in Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda, Chanel (New York:

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991), 73.ix Liz Conor , The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 252. x The Ballets Russes’ ballet master Sergei Grigoriev noted that Diaghilev was

accused of pursuing what was as ‘any moment fashionable in the arts’ in ballets

‘where the leading object was surprise’. Sergei Grigoriev, The Diaghilev Ballet

1909-1929, Translated from the Russian by Vera Bowen (London: Constable,

1953), 156.xi Edgar Degas, Sonnet V (1889) translated by Richard Kendall. In Richard Kendall

and Jill de Vonyar, Degas and the Dance (New York: Abrams, 2002).xii

Yuri Slonimsky, ‘Balanchine: The Early Years’, translated from the Russian by

John Andrews, Ballet Review (New York: Dance Research Foundation, 1975-6)Vol.3: 29.


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xiii The ballet La Chatte premiered on April 30, 1927. The choreography was by

George Balanchine, the music by Henri Sauget and the set and costume design by

Naum Gabo.xiv Martin Hammer, Constructing Modernity: The Art and Career of Naum Gabo

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 159.xv

Hammer, Art and Career of Naum Gabo, 159.xvi

Grigoriev, Diaghilev Ballet, 235. xvii

Alice Nikitina, Nikitina: by herself , (London: Wingate, 1959), 59.xviii

The couturier Premet said in an interview ‘If fashion stays the way it is, it will become a public menace. Clothes nowadays don’t vary enough from one season to

the next’. Premet interview with M. Winters in Les Cahiers, January

1927.Translated from the French by Jacqueline Demornex. Quoted in JacquelineDemornex, Lucien Lelong , (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008), 56.xix

Translation by author : ‘the line is kinetic and the effect is obtained by treatment

of different parts of the silhouette’. Lucien Lelong, ‘La Mode kinoptique’,

L’Officiel de la Couture et la Mode de Paris, (Paris, March 1927). xx

Lelong, ‘La Mode Kinoptique’. xxi

L’Officiel de la Couture et la Mode de Paris, (Paris, May 1928).xxii

Arnold, ‘Vionnet and Classicism’, 3.xxiii

Apollo was originally titled Apollon Musagète and premiered on April 27,

1928. It was choreographed by George Balanchine, designed and costumed byAndré Bauchant, with music by Stravinsky.xxiv

Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography, (London: Boyars, 1990), 134.xxv

Stephanie Jordan , Stravinsky Dances: Re-visions Across a Century, (Alton:

Dance Books, 2007), 147.xxvi

George Balanchine, quoted in Arnold Haskell, Arnold Haskell, Balletomania:

the Story of an Obsession, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1934), 146. xxvii

Alexandra Danilova, Choura: the Memoirs of Alexandra Danilova, ( New

York: Knopf, 1986), 99; Nikitina, Nikitina by Herself , 89.xxviii

Madeleine Vionnet quoted in: Betty Kirke, Madeleine Vionnet , (SanFranscisco: Chronicle Books, 1998), 27.xxix

Pamela Golbin, Madeleine Vionnet , (New York: Rizzoli, 2009), 25.xxx

Arnold, ‘Vionnet and Classicism’, 5.xxxi

Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, translated

from the French by Margaret Sankey (London and New York: Continuum, 2009),

62.xxxii

The Prodigal Son was choreographed by George Balanchine, designed by

George Rouault with music by Prokofiev. It premiered on May 21, 1929.xxxiii

Felia Dubrovska quoted in Barbara Newman, Striking a Balance: DancersTalk About Dancing (London: Elm Tree Books, 1982), 7.xxxiv

Dubrovska, Striking a Balance, 7.


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xxxv Dubrovska, Striking a Balance, 7.

xxxvi Danilova, Choura, 78.

xxxvii

Dubrovska, Striking a Balance, 7.xxxviii The Woman He Scorned , Film, directed by Paul Czinner (1929, United

Kingdom). xxxix

‘Lingerie of Cobweb Texture’, Harper’s Bazaar (New York: Hearst

Publications) March, 1929.xl Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Travel and Dance’, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays,

Translated from the German by Thomas Y Levin (Cambridge MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1995), 66.

BibliographyArnold, Rebecca. ‘Vionnet and Classicism’ in Madeleine Vionnet, 15 Dresses

from the Collection of Martin Kamer, Judith Clark Costume, 15 March – 26 April2001, ed. Judith Clark (London: Judith Clark Costume, 2001).

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex , Translated from the French by H.M

Parshley (New York : Modern Books, 1968).

Bolton, Andrew and Koda, Harold. Chanel , (New York: Metropolitan Museum

of Art, 1991).

Conor, Liz. The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).

Danilova, Alexandra. Choura: the Memoirs of Alexandra Danilova, (New York:

Knopf, 1986).

Demornex, Jacqueline. Lucien Lelong , (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008).

Golbin, Pamela. Madeleine Vionnet , (New York: Rizzoli, 2009).

Grigoriev, Sergei. The Diaghilev Ballet 1909-1929, Translated from the Russian byVera Bowen (London: Constable, 1953).

Hammer, Martin. Constructing Modernity: The Art and Career of Naum Gabo

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

Harper’s Bazaar (New York: Hearst Publications).


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Haskell, Arnold. Balletomania: the Story of an Obsession, (New York: Simon &

Schuster, 1934).

Jordan , Stephanie. Stravinsky Dances: Re-visions Across a Century, (Alton: Dance

Books, 2007).

Kirke, Betty. Madeleine Vionnet , (San Franscisco: Chronicle Books, 1998).

Kracauer, Siegfied. ‘Travel and Dance’, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays,

Translated from the German by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge MA: Harvard

University Press, 1995).

L’Officiel d e la Couture et la Mode de Paris, (Paris).

Newman, Barbara. Striking a Balance: Dancers Talk About Dancing, (London:

Elm Tree Books, 1982).

Nikitina, Alice. Nikitina: By Herself , (London: Wingate, 1959).

Schilder, Paul. The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in

Constructive Energies of the Psyche (New York: International Universities PressInc., 1950).

Serres, Michel. The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, translated from

the French by Margaret Sankey (London and New York: Continuum, 2009).

Stravinsky, Igor. An Autobiography, (London: Boyars, 1990).

Filmography

The Woman He Scorned , Film, directed by Paul Czinner (1929, United Kingdom).

List of Illustrations

Image 1. Alice Nikitina and Serge Lifar in ‘La Chatte’, 1927, photographic print,

Tate collections, in Martin Hammer, Constructing Modernity : The Art and

Career of Naum Gabo, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, pg. 152.


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Image 2. Chanel dress, 1928, illustrated print, in L’Officiel de la Couture et la Mode de Paris, Paris, May 1928.

Image 3. Figure 18. G.L. Manuel Freres, Alice Nikitina as Terpsichore in ‘Apollon

Musagete’. Paris, 1928. In Musee Nationale de l’Opera de Paris, Bibliothèque

nationale de France, Paris.

Image 4. Unknown photographer, Danilova as Terpsichore in ‘Apollon Musagete’

. c.1928. In Choura: the Memoirs of Alexandra Danilova by Alexandra Danilova.

New York: Knopf, 1986, pg. 9.

Image 5. Cecil Beaton, Mannequin in Vionnet dress, 1929. In Madeleine Vionnet

by Betty Kirke, San Franscisco: Chronicle Books, 1998, pg. 38.

Image 6. David, Felia Doubrovska in ‘Le Fils Prodigue’ , 1929, photographic print,

Parmenia Ekstrom Collection (157) ,Harvard Theatre Collection, Cambridge,

Massachusetts .

Image 7. Pola Negri in ‘The Woman he Scorned’, 1929, photographic print in Pola

Negri, Memoirs of a Star (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970).

Image 8. Kitmir, Seed pearls, glass beads and silk thread on black silk tulle

sample, late 1920s in Fonds Kitmir, Maison Hurel, Paris.

Image 9. Lingerie of Cobweb Texture, illustrated print in Harper’s Bazaar (New

York: Hearst Publications) March, 1929.


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Illustrations

Image 1 - Alice Nikitina and Serge Lifar in La Chatte, 1927

Image 2 - Chanel dress promotion, 1928

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&docid=MFWZRhzTRnjyuM&tbnid=g_9TJgTpN4zivM:&ved=0CAUQjRw&url=http://pinterest.com/albamaryx/danza-del-recuerdo/&ei=6n0wUbOkL8md0QW6lIEg&bvm=bv.43148975,d.d2k&psig=AFQjCNGQIdKHmtfGGDOYQmPvKClISZRqxw&ust=1362218855237201


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Image 3 - Nikitina as Terpsichore in Apollo, 1928

Image 4 - Danilova as Terpsichore in Apollo, 1928


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Image 5 - Cecil Beaton, Vionnet dress, 1929

Image 6 - David, Felia Doubrovska in ‘Prodigal Son’ , 1929


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Image 7- Pola Negri in The Woman he Scorned , 1929

Image 8 - Kitmir, Seed pearls, glass beads and silk thread on black silk tulle

sample, late 1920s


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