Sketch Book for the Artist

Costume

LEON BAKST
Lev. Samoylovich Rosenberg,
known as Leon Bakst, was a
Belarussian Art Deco theater
and costume designer trained
in St. Petersburg and later exiled
to Paris, As artistic director of the
Ballet Russe, he and cofounder
Serge Diaghilev took Paris by
storm in 1910 with their production
of Scheherazade. Bakst's designs
and costumes immediately
influenced Parisian fashion and
interior decor, This voluptuous
woman was drawn by Bakst one
year later for the ballet Narcisse. In
a rich and unusual combination of
pencil, charcoal, and gouache, the
dancer leaps through swaths of
golden cloth.

Bacchante

1911

111 / 4 x 8^1 / 2 in (285 x 220 mm)

LEON BAKST

W

E MAKE OURSELVES EXOTIC, outrageous, intriguing, and even invisible by the way we

dress. Like it or not, it is the public sign by which we are judged, and everything

we have chosen for our wardrobes—reflectors of our taste, personality, culture, and

profession—began life as a drawing. Designers all over the world continually pen and

brush lines to lash us with color, warmth, and exuberance, or calm us with chic, cool,

and subtle tones. Popular fashion design exploded with the Industrial Revolution.

Previously, only the wealthy could afford to have costumes specially made. The rural

masses wore homespun simplicity, while court painters—Michelangelo and Holbein, for

example—designed the wardrobes of popes and kings, and courtier tailors followed

suit. Cities changed all, so that choice, variety, and indeed image became the property

also of the industrial classes.

The paper pattern is perhaps the most widely known of costume drawings: a

formalized plan of lines, shapes, and symbols that lets men and women in all countries

and areas have working access to the latest fashions. The entourage of the theatrical

stage often leads the catwalk. Designers create masterpieces of haute couture for

Hollywood stars, fulfilling lavish and spectacular briefs, which in turn feed consumer

fantasies and desires to immediately possess a version of the same. We dress ourselves

in designers' ideas and are surprised and delighted by their continual flow of inspiration.

It is shocking to think how many millions of drawings must be made and discarded

each year in the industrial frenzy of creating our image and aspirations.

To the fine artist, costume offers a rich vocabulary of textures and color, but

above all a physical puppet with which to animate character and narrate personality,

psychology, and intent. Artists do this not so much by the style of a figure's garment,

but by the way it speaks with its flying, glossy folds, caricatured plumes, crumples,

or bulges. In this chapter we see how clothing can seem to possess the weight and

monumentality of stone, articulate a dangerous satirical joke, and be so expressive of

temperament that it overtakes the need for an occupying human form. Practical classes

look at ranges of colored materials including pastels and felt-tip pens. Structure is

studied though the invention of shoes, and we will collect patterns, emulate textures,

and explore the characterization of fabric through movement, gesture, and atmosphere.