Boudoir – The Court Dress of Russia
Another Boudoir again… Since the weather is getting more and more colder here, in Europe, the topic of today’s Boudoir is really actual – as this issue is about the magnificient court gowns of the Russian Empire.
Among the court dresses, perhaps the Russian is the most well-known due to the popularity of the Romanov family. The Russian court dress was born, living and died with the Romanovs – it started to develop during the reign of Empress Catherine II, it became the official wear under Tsar Nicholas I and it got lost with the death of the last Tsar, Nicholas II and his family.
„The Russian court dress was exceedingly picturesque and was donned for all bigger occasions. It consisted of amply cut velvet robes over a tablier of white satin; the shape, with its train, and wide, long-hanging sleeves, had something medival about it. These robes were heavily embroidered in silver or gold and were of every colour of the rainbow; the richest of all were of cloth of gold or silver. A halo-shaped cocoshnic with a veil hanging from beneath it inevitably accompanied this costume, so that every woman appeared to have been crowned. This unity of attire made all Russian court gatherings uniquely picturesque, saturating them with colour and brilliance unlike anything else; veritable pictures out of the ’Thousand and One Nights’, Byzantine in splendour, with all the mysterious gorgeousness of the East. In those days the processional entry of the Russian Imperial family into festive hall or saint-haunted church was a picture once seen never to be forgotten.” – Queen Marie of Romania
The roots of the Russian court dress, like in the case of almost every others, were the national costumes. Because of the westernization programme of Peter I, the Russian dresses disappeared from the imperial court and from the circles of the nobility – by the 1720s the Western fashion, first the German and then the French, became the trendsetting. However, in 1762 a foreign, German princess ascended the throne. She was Empress Catherine II the Great, and with her reign came the dawn of the Russian style dress. She had to emphasize her „russianness”, so she wore Russian caftan, sarafan and kokoshnik. Under her successors the court wear for women – the men wore their military uniforms – became somehow chaotic, as everybody dressed up as she wanted. When Nicholas I published the Code of Laws of the Russian Empire in 1833, it was time to set the gowns of the court in order. One volume of the Code of Laws was the edict on court dresses.The ’ceremonial court dress’ (платье парадное придворное) was basically a white embroidered silk gown, with an embroidered velvet overdress with long, open sleeves in the Muscovite style. The skirts were rouched and fastened at the waist, held together by a gold cord. The shape of the skirt, although it changed with the Parisian fashion, at first was bell-like and full, the sleeves slightly puffed at the shoulders. As Nick Nicholson described, „the embroidery of these gowns was extraordinary. Sometimes featuring floral motifs, or rocailles inspired by the architecture of the capital, the art of the embroidery was at a very high level.” The dresses were unimaginably expensive, really heavy and uncomfortable, but the Russian court ladies wore them with pride and elegance. The headdress originally meant kokoshnik, but the members of the Imperial Family preferred kokoshnik-style tiaras over real kokoshniks.
There were many styles of the female court dresses: the ladies-in-waiting wore a more simple gown than the empress, and their dresses were similiar to each other. According to the age of the wearing person, the style changed too: little girls’ dress was short and simple, teenagers, however, could wear either the official gown or a ’teenager version’, as in the case of Grand Duchess Mariya Pavlovna the Younger (shown on the picture). The colours, the embroidery were also different, depending on the rank and status of the wearer. A Mistress of the Court, for example, wore a dress of gold embroidered raspberry velvet with a long skirt and an underskirt of white satin also richly embroidered in gold. The headdress was a kokoshnik of the same color velvet with a long white veil of lace or tulle. A Lady of Honour’s and a Maids of Honour of the Bedchamber’s court gown was the same cut and design as that of the Mistress of the Court, except the kokoshnik and the dress were made of dark green velvet. The Empress had the right to wear golden or silver gown, but since the golden was extremely heavy, it was only used at the coronation ceremony, and at other occasions the gown was made from silver. The daughters of the Emperor also could wear silver gown, but only if the Empress not wore – in that case, they could choose the colour of their own dress according to their taste, and that colour was „reserved” for them.
Also, not anybody could make a court dress: the right to produce one was controlled. The most well-known dressmakers in the early 20th century were Bulbenkova and Ivanova. Unfortunately the days of the court dresses declined with the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the rise of the Soviet rule. Those members of the imperial family, who were not killed during the revolution and successfully fled to abroad, had no money to buy a court dress – and without the imperial court, probably there was no point to wear one, too. The last ladies, who wore a Russian court dress (on their wedding) were the daughters of Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich, who proclaimed himself as the Emperor of all Russias.
by Alla
Comments
Post a Comment