Léon Bakst and Fashion: Beyond and After the Ballets Russes

Abstract

Shortly after designing costumes for the Ballets Russes' piece Jeux, Léon Bakst collaborated with the couture house Paquin in 1913, and continued to engage with dress and textile design up to his death in 1924, variously embracing oriental, neo-classical and Russian ethnic aesthetic idioms. Due to his symbolist artistic education, personal tastes and financial circumstances, Bakst did not fulfil his dream to design new fashions for the woman of the future within the commercial world of haute couture. Instead, most of his dress designs during the First World War until his death were created as one-off pieces for a group of very rich, extravagant women. Bakst was nevertheless a passionate advocate of modernity, and a skilful manipulator in the field of contemporary media, in which he equally vigorously promoted his own oeuvre, the phenomenon of fashion and the concept of a new emancipated woman. Bakst's retrograde aesthetic and his progressive writings show him as a striving modernist, carefully navigating his personal interests and business opportunities in the rapidly changing times at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article integrates Bakst's dress designs and his thoughts in the global discourse on the concepts of fashion, modernity, feminism and cosmopolitanism.