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Article Excerpt
In Abel Faivre's satirical rendering of its 1913 opening, the spare, neoclassical foyer of the Theatre des Champs-Elysees is set off by the equally sleek, columnar bodies of women milling about. At the far right of this caricature we see two such fashionable specimens. One, though plump and matronly, wears a tight, form-fitting gown whose daringly strapless neckline contrasts with her prim, round spectacles. The other, young and slim, sports a simple, Empire-waist gown and hair-obscuring turban patterned after Paul Poiret's confections of the moment. (1) To these ladies' left, another finely-attired Parisienne--pearls dripping from her head and neck--surveys this scene. Purposefully striding ahead of her tuxedoed escort, she speaks the cartoon's caption: "Delightful auditorium! And one is seen from all the seats." (2)
The joke, it seems, is a simple one. Our sparkling bourgeoise imagines herself--rather than the onstage spectacle--to be the main attraction. The theater thus is transformed from a center of culture into a cult of feminine self-display. By 1913, such accusations had become commonplace in commentary on the Paris season. They cropped up with particular frequency in reviews of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes troupe, whose Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) received its infamous premiere at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees that year. (3) From its first Parisian performances in 1909, the company had been associated with the flashy vulgarity of nouveaux-riches who "glory in stuffing the hall with their diamonds and their pearls," as one reviewer put it. (4)
As this comment suggests, women bore the brunt of such criticism, which reached a fevered pitch in discussion of The Rite of Spring. Making a punning reference to the department store Au Printemps, the critic Gustave de Pawlowski sneered at female viewers who "assumed [the ballet] would concern the latest fashions promoted by a novelty shop." (5) Writing in Le Feu, Emile Cottinet blamed the "Queens of Paris and of Fashion" for the riot that broke out during the work's premiere--as did Emile Raulin, who proposed to readers of Les Marges that all of the "ill-bred" people be kicked out for one performance in order to allow for a more rational evaluation of the ballet. "One could, at least," he wrote, "suggest that the feminine element in it be evicted." (6)
Such complaints were made with tongue more or less planted in cheek. Yet beneath this light-hearted derisiveness one can also detect an anxious, resentful tone. Whence had this female mob emerged, and where was it taking French culture? Implicitly, such descriptions contrasted the Champs-Elysees with the foyers of the Opera--a building haunted by members of the Jockey Club, the men who lurk and ogle in Edgar Degas's images of that nineteenth-century pleasure palace. (7) Women instead seemed to dominate the venues where the Ballets Russes performed--as Faivre's caricature intimates, both through their visible presence and in their confident assumption of the role of spectator.
Sonia Delaunay's costume design for the title character of Cleopdtre by the Ballets Russes, a garment that mirrored the fashions of women in the audience, inserted itself directly into this contentious discourse. When Cleopdtre, choreographed by Michel Fokine, premiered in 1909, its powerful female lead, Ida Rubinstein, wore a stereotypically Orientalist costume designed by Leon Bakst. Her glittering metal bustier and girdle mimicked those worn by other popular dancers of the moment, such as Maud Allan in Salome (1904) and Ruth St. Denis in Radha (1906). Redesigning the ballet in 1918, Delaunay dramatically altered the presentation of its title character. This garment retained some exoticizing touches: the tantalizing expanse of beaded decolletage, the luxurious gems and stones, even the abstract asp in the dancer's crown. However, Delaunay also inserted instantly recognizable marks of period high fashion. The tightly-tapered "hobble" skirt, high bodice, straight waist, and tasseled fringes made Cleopatra look as if she had just stepped out of the pages of La Gazette du bon ton. Even the execution of Delaunay's design underscored its fashionable lineage: the garment was fabricated at one of Poiret's ateliers. (8)
Associated with the controversial figure of the New Woman, the style Delaunay adopted for this costume signified a rejection of traditional feminine roles. In comparison with the hourglass shape popular during the late nineteenth century, its straight silhouette appeared androgynous, even boyish, in the eyes of many. Wearers of this type of clothing were said to favor commensurately unfeminine pursuits: the author of a 1925 article entitled "The Emancipation of the Modern Young Woman: Is This Real Progress?" enumerated such pastimes as "sports, movies, dancing, cars, and the unhealthy need to be always on the move." (9) Remaking the Egyptian queen into a chic Parisienne, this costume shifted viewers' attention from the fictionalized, otherworldly setting of the ballet to the contemporary context of the Champs-Elysees and to the social anxieties that site conjured.
The parameters of this project allowed Delaunay to explore the contradictions surrounding women's prominent role as consumers of culture in the early twentieth century. As the target audience of a range of urban entertainments, including shopping, cinema, and theater, women seemed to enjoy a greater degree of freedom and influence than ever before. Advertisements of the period manifested this newfound power in addressing themselves directly to a female gaze: as Ruth Iskin notes, posters depicting women walking, driving, and even skiing "offer[ed] possibilities of identification for modern women of the time by portraying them as active consumers of a wide range of products and activities." (10) At the same time, their increasing visibility in public subjected women to probing scrutiny, as evidenced by the explosion of articles, plays, and novels on the behavior of these scandalously independent beings." (11) Moreover, as Rita Felski has argued, women's "liberation" was limited to a consumerist frame, such that "intimate needs, desires, and perceptions of self were mediated by public representations of commodities and the gratifications that they promised." (12)
Cleopatra's costume sensitively registered these conflicting pressures. Flashy, shiny, and dramatically revealing, it both made an assertive statement and aligned the wearer with the independent New Woman. In so doing, however, the garment put its wearer emphatically on display--an objectification of the female body that undermined some of the power that its style connoted. At the same time, the dress fit harmoniously within the overall design scheme of the ballet, such that it at least partly camouflaged the dancer's body when she wore it onstage. The gown, in other words, betrayed its designer's awareness of the complexities of the New Woman's public image, both within the particular context of the Ballets Russes season and in Paris at large.
Delaunay's design also sheds new light on the reception of the Ballets Russes by Western European audiences, and the applicability of traditional concepts of Orientalism to this phenomenon. Larded with hyperbole, reviews of the troupe often differentiated the exotic, "savage" Russians from their "overcivilized" Parisian viewers--as when the critic Emile Vuillermoz described its dancers as "barbarians ... who humiliate the Occident with their Oriental wisdom." (13) Such statements propped up geographic and cultural divides between the Ballets Russes and its audience, divides that quite evidently were shrinking day by day. From the company's new home base at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees to the vogue for fashion and interior decoration a...
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