How 20th-century Ballet Connected Artists Across Disciplines

“Had it not been for [Ballets Russes founder] Sergei Diaghilev in 1909 we would probably not see ballet become the art form it is,” Dr. Patricia Mears, who curated the exhibition, said during a phone interview. “He completely reinvigorated, elevated it and also shocked audiences with this new modern avant-garde kind of ballet.”

Despite how influential the total work of art of Les Ballets Russes was in pre-World War II arts and culture, Ballerina: Fashion’s Modern Muse, does not give it a lot of space. With the exception of the costume for a production of the avant-garde ballet Firebird, the exhibition focuses on the way iconic costumes such as Swan Lake’s all-white Swan-Queen costume and its black counterpart, Sleeping Beauty’s pink, court-dress-inspired inspired tutu, and Giselle’s and La Sylphide’s diaphanous, full-skirted tutus influenced the fashion industry. The reason? As much as the turbans, the harem pants and the “pagan-Russia-inspired” costumes you see in, respectively, Scheherazade and Rite of Spring were fashionable at the time, “those were not really ballerina costumes,” said Mears. Excluding the more avant-garde costumes was, thus, an editorial decision.

In the 1930s, mainstream fashion blatantly took cues from the world of dance. The catalyst was a production of Sleeping Beauty. Ever since the Tchaikovsky ballet premiered in 1890, it had been lauded for its rich color palette that emancipated ballet from the monopoly of the ballets blancs, which had a predominantly white palette in costume designs. “With its bright and sometimes clashing pigments, Sleeping Beauty recalibrated ballet’s palette and made an indelible impression on Sergei Diaghilev and his coterie of costume designers,” writes Mears in the essay “Ballet and Couture in the Mid Century,” that appears in the accompanying catalogue.

One of the signature performances in Sleeping Beauty is the Bluebird pas de deux, which had a male dancer clad in bright shades of blue. Elsa Schiaparelli’s second signature hue, after “Shocking Pink,” is “Sleeping Blue,” which was clearly inspired by the ballet. Another color whose trendiness was spearheaded by Sleeping Beauty was lilac, the color worn by the namesake fairy, who acts as the savior in the ballet. Once a color loosely associated with mourning, by the 1930s it was widely celebrated on the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and at Bergdorf Goodman. “It’s Lilac Time—fragrant exquisiteness,” read an ad copy promoting a gown.

Jewelry was not immune to the charms of ballet either: the “ballerina cocktail ring” was invented in the 1920s and it consisted of “a halo of tapered, baguette-cut diamonds shimmering around a large round center stone,” writes Mears. The connection with ballet? If viewed from the above, the ring resembled a flared tutu. In 1939, Van Cleef and Arpels, debuted the Ballerina brooch, depicting a dancer mid-arabesque; in 1941, they released a Danseuse Espagnole brooch, while, in 1944, they designed one directly inspired by famous prima ballerina Anna Pavlova. After all, Louis Arpels was a noted balletomane.

Perhaps no ballet symbolizes this synergy of different art forms better than George Balanchine’s Jewels (1967) the seemingly plotless extravaganza in three disjointed acts: Emeralds, Rubies, Diamonds. What it is, however, is a tribute to dance, jewelry, art history, and history of ballet itself, the costumes a reflection of different ballet eras and traditions. Emeralds is a tribute to romantic ballet and has the dancers clad in calf-length tutus; Rubies, a celebration of America, has dancers dance to Stravinsky wearing red bodices with flaps; while Diamonds, a reflection of the legacy of Imperial Russia, came with short, powder-puffed tutus. Of course, all costumes were adorned with jewel-encrusted patterns.

”Many of the ballets reference princesses and members of royalty or some magical creature like a fairy, so what's better to invoke that sense than a jewel in the modern sense, as we can think about the ballerina as the jewel within the performing arts?” said Mears, referencing the fact that ballets tended to have their female lead play a role that could be a princess (Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty) or some magical, ethereal being (La Sylphide, Giselle). As the story goes, Balanchine himself was inspired by looking at the windows of Van Cleef and Arpels on Fifth Avenue.

Jewels are an apt metaphor for what the ballerina stands for. “She's a glistening, idealized beauty, something that's both real but also intangible at the same time.”