Karinska's Costumes: The designer who changed the shape of ballet

Born in Ukraine in 1886, Varvara Andryevna Zmoudsky would later be known as Barbara Karinska, Madame Karinska or more simply, Karinska. She was one of choreographer George Balanchine’s most significant collaborators and together they worked on 75 ballets including Serenade and Jewels, but her most groundbreaking innovation came during the 1950s with the ‘powder puff tutu’ for Balanchine’s Symphony in C.

This invention revolutionised the pancake tutu, giving the skirt structure without the need for a metal hoop and cutting the bodice to be more flexible and allow for more freedom of movement from the dancer.

Yet before the powder puff, before Balanchine and before the ballet, Karinska was a formidable figure in history.

As a child she learned Victorian embroidery from her German and Swiss governesses and later studied law at Kharkiv Imperial University. She moved to Moscow in 1916 where her she became a pivotal part of the arts scene, hosting a salon every evening after the theatre or ballet.

During this time, Karinska experimented with different methods of painting and applying coloured silk to photographs and drawings. She exhibited her pieces in a prominent Moscow gallery to great critical and financial success.

Following the abdication of Czar Nicholas II and the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Karinska returned to Moscow in 1920 where she opened an embroidery school and couture design studio to dress the wives of Russia’s Soviet elite. In the same building, she ran a tea shop that became the meeting place for Russia’s prominent artists, academics and government officials each day at 5pm.

After the death of Vladimir Lenin and the uncertainty of the new regime, Karinska left Moscow with her children, smuggling diamonds she had sewn into her daughters' hat and US$100 bills in her sons' schoolbooks, along with antique embroideries of Russian royalty, out of the country.

Karinska and her family settled in Paris where she began designing for film, theatre and ballet. A newly formed company, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo commissioned her to make the costumes for their inaugural season which featured choreography by George Balanchine. In 1933, Karinska constructed the costumes for Balanchine and Boris Kochno’s short lived company Les Ballets.

Karinska expanded her costume empire in London during the 1930s and left for the US as the impending threat of WWII grew nearer.