Ballet Russes influence on fashion.

The Ballet Russes was a travelling ballet company which performed between 1909 and 1929, and is considered one of the greatest ballet companies of all time. Directed by Sergei Diaghilev, it is said to have 'landed with a crash' on Parisian stages and changed the style of everything forthwith: music, ballet choreography, art, decor, and primarily, fashion. The strong relationship between choreographers, dancers, designers, and the production team ensured a spectacular performance, that quickly grew to be a very popular wonder that people would travel for miles to witness. It was also the companies relationship with fashion that certified and created one of the most influential fashion movements of the twentieth century. The Ballet Russes interpretation of fashion was not so much about the creation of a garment, 'as fashionability, a conjunction of performed glamour, conspicuous outrage, publicity and pizazz that Diaghilev exploited so well.'

The relationship between couture and modernism in the arts at the start of the 20th century was strong. Diaghilev's experimentation with ballet was created for Paris, because he had made social and financial connections there with exhibitions of Russian paintings, and also because he figured out that Paris was art's pre-eminent city, it commanded the luxury trades, and in new media.
In the 1890s, the invention of moving image, plus shorter exposure times for still images, made it possible to catch movement, while cheaply obtainable photographic reproductions endorsed the change in body consciousness.
The choreography and costume of the Ballet Russes proved inspiration for popular designers of the time such as Paul Poiret and Gabrielle Chanel. Obviously the inspiration of Mikhail Fokine's choreography for Diaghilev, and the revealing, skimpy costumes of Léon Bakst, didn't single-handedly make Paul Poiret to surrender the corset, or persuade Gabrielle Chanel to simplify the belle époque evening gown into the little black dress. It’s more they answered to broader creative and technical discoveries. Chanel, whose father had sold men's underwear made of factory-knitted stockinet (jersey), was aware from childhood that the dull fabric draped well, and drapery on the natural body was readable as sexy. From about 1912, Chanel cut skirts from it for her first boutique.
 
Writing about the Ballet Russes show how an inexpensive addition to a Parisian daily entertainment paper, in conspiracy with the Russians, worked out every modern publicity method before any of the US discovered the film-fan magazine. It had vast collections of images of the members of the Ballet Russes in costume and frozen motion poses – also, for example, one sequence was bordered with photographs in strips, as if they were a reel for projection. It showed ballerinas in their preferred couture, usually Poiret, thus promoting the designers products and boosting the Russes popularity. Its artists supplied ballet articles for initial copies, and photographs for advertisers who borrowed Russian themes – the sexy east and Slavic peasant – for lingerie and cosmetics. It was no longer just hype, it went further than that, and became promotion. This is how the company became so popular and became a huge inspiration and influence to the worldwide fashion industry.

Many of these magazines and programmes still prove inspiration for designers many years after and still remains influencial with designers in the present day. in 1976, Yves Saints Laurent's catwalk exotica collection was based on the Ballet Russes.  The collection pieces are beautiful, but the true form of Bakst's colour, and of Natalia Goncharova's stunning graphics, lives on in the form of Zandra Rhodes and Celia Birtwell, both of them designing à la Russe to this day.