Nadia Albertini
Glass Bead Embroidery at Oranienbaum Castle
In the 18th century, Imperial Russia embraced Europe’s fascination with chinoiserie, exemplified by the luxurious Chinese Palace of Oranienbaum commissioned by Catherine II. Inspired by Jean Pillement’s designs, the palace’s glass bead embroidery panels combine rococo elegance with Oriental fantasy. Created between 1762 and 1764, they were overseen by French director Marie de Chelles and executed by nine Russian embroiderers, blending French techniques with Russian craftsmanship. The work used silk chenille threads and over two million glass beads from a local mosaic factory. This embroidery method, originating in 17th-century French convents, was masterfully adapted to an imperial context. The ensemble highlights women’s key role in textile production and the artistic exchanges between France and Russia.
In 2025, the Lyon-based Prelle manufacture recreated one of these panels through silk and silver weaving, merging historical artistry with modern innovation. This reinterpretation celebrates continuity, creativity, and the living legacy of textile heritage.
Carole Damour
Catherine II and the splendors of Lyon silk
In the 18th century, Catherine II of Russia, a great intellectual with a passion for arts, wanted her country to rival the greatest European courts and implemented a modernisation of culture in all its forms, drawing inspiration from the Enlightenment.
Impressed by their finesse and elegance, she decorated her various palaces with silks from Lyon. The finest specialists worked to create sumptuous textiles, distinguished by their highly technical designs and refined compositions.
The brochés, delivered between 1771 and 1790, are true masterpieces, some of whose motifs can still be seen in Russian palaces today, strengthening the commercial and cultural ties between France and Russia.
Ksenia Gusarova
Between Imitation and Competition :
French Fashion in Le Magasin des modes by Sofia Meï
The article examines the editorial choices of Sofia Meï, the founder of the key Russian women’s magazine of Alexander II’s era, Modnyi magazin [Модный магазин], concerning the borrowing and adaptation of images and texts from La Mode illustrée in 1863–65. This case study foregrounds the dynamics of Franco-Russian relations in the fields of fashion and fashion journalism. Like many countries of the western world in the nineteenth century, Russia depended on Paris for fashion news, imagery, commodities and technical expertise. Fashion and women’s journals like Modnyi magazin amply borrowed from French periodicals, with fashion plates a particularly indispensable resource. However, these and other images, texts and fashion trends received a rhetorical framing that downplayed the dependence on France and presented local agents, above all the journal’s editorial board, as powerful players in the field of fashion. The article discusses the strategies deployed in order to further this agenda, from selective omission and subtle changes in translation to attempts at dramatic reversal of power dynamics, which is illustrated by Modnyi magazin’s coverage of the so-called “Russian blouses”.
Wilfried Zeisler
French Fashion and the House of Corbay in Russia
The success of French fashion in the Russian Empire dates back to the reign of Peter the Great, which was accompanied by numerous reforms. One of these changes forced the local elite to adopt Western fashion. The sometimes contradictory decrees imposed by the empire’s sovereigns, attempting to impose a national costume at court, largely contributed to this story. It is first summarized and illustrated with previously unpublished examples of the consumption of French fashion, notably the creations of the House of Corbay, by prominent clients. Formerly Fauvet, the House of Corbay enjoyed great success with Russian clients during the Second Empire. These relations faded during the 1890s, although the Franco-Russian alliance was at its peak. The Revolution brought an end to orders placed by the imperial elite but accelerated Russian influence on French fashion, which the émigrés instilled in Parisian creation in the interwar period.
Gwen Van Den Eijnde
Bakstʹs Sleeping Beauties at the Wadsworth Museum of Art
The author evokes the prolific work of Léon Bakst, the brilliant costume designer of the Ballets Russes. Drawing on the costumes for the ballet The Sleeping Princess (1921) preserved at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, in the United States, he explains the innovative nature of Bakstʹs work and the modernity of his vision for the stage.
Bakst has influenced several generations of designers for a century. The sumptuous costumes, removed from their archive boxes at the Museum, resurface today as witnesses to a fascinating history and an aesthetic culture that brings together theatre and fashion. But these costumes also tell the lesser-known story of the return of classicism in the last decade of the Ballets Russes.
Mathilde Héliot
The Russian Avant-garde through Fashion, in the USSR and in France
Beginning in the 1910s, innovations in Russian clothing design emerged in close connection with Futurism. After 1917, these explorations were further developed by the artistic avant-garde, including constructivist artists. With the establishment of Soviet power and the resulting transformation of daily life, clothing became a field of unprecedented aesthetic, functional, and political reflection. The avant-garde sought to integrate art, industry, and everyday life through dress, in ways that were variably aligned with the political ideals of the time. Parallel to this renewal of clothing design in the USSR, Russian artists living in France created garments that evoked both traditional Russian folk art and the contemporary experiments of the Soviet avant-garde. French women’s fashion of the 1920s shown an interest in regionalism and exoticism, often through an imaginary vision of Russia. Finally, certain garments produced in the Soviet Union were presented in France at the 1925 Exhibition, although they attracted limited attention, despite several Soviet exhibitors receiving awards.
Domitille Éblé
The Russian Inspirations in Yves Saint Laurent’s Work
Yves Saint Laurent (1936–2008) began his creative path at Christian Dior in 1955, before founding his own couture house in 1961 and retiring in 2002. Throughout his long career, Russia remained one of his “imaginery journeys, ” at least until 1976, when he visited the country for the first time. The fall-winter 1976 haute couture collection, known as « Opéra - Ballets Russes », is undoubtedly the most celebrated expression of this fascination.
This study seeks to explore the many sources of inspiration that Russia embodied in the couturier’s work, both in his fashion collections and in his collaborations with the performing arts. We will conclude by evoking the enduring fascination Yves Saint Laurent displayed in his private life for all things Russian.
Rachel Mazuy
Between Soviet Glamour and Economic Functionality :
Representations of Soviet Fashion
in France-URSS Magazine (1957- 1970s)
The period from the Khrushchev Thaw to the saw France-URSS magazine (FUM) develop a representation of Soviet fashion that, while faithful to the official discourse of the USSR, remained rooted in the French cultural landscape.
The magazine had to obey a double constraint : on the one hand, the ideological promotion of the communist model and, on the other hand, respect for Western cultural codes, in line with the target audience. This resulted in a complex rhetoric, playing on the codes of a very French “Western glamour”, while promoting the social progress and economic functionality of the Soviet model.
Stylistically, the fashion articles used language and codes reminiscent of Western women’s magazines, as in the USSR. Furthermore, in a move that could be described as paradoxical given the ideology, the magazine highlighted French haute couture, thereby promoting Franco-Soviet relations during this period.
This French perspective is also evident in the personalization of the reports. In order to lend credibility to its arguments, FUM favoured the accounts and analyses of French correspondents and witnesses who travelled to or resided in the USSR, reviving a mechanism of testimony established in the 1920s. This French perspective reveals, between the lines, a somewhat more nuanced assessment of Soviet realities, particularly with regard to shortages of consumer goods and the way people dressed. However, in the early 1970s, the theme of fashion seemed to give way definitively to a more functional and economic approach, with the magazine becoming more austere overall.
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