Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and designer Pierre Cardin presented a joint show on the stage of the concert hall “Russia” in Moscow
Photo: TASS photo chronicle.
This is the famous black velvet dress with a green-burgundy tren, which was created for the great ballerina by the French couturier Pierre Cardin. In 2017, two years after the death of Maya Plisetskaya, the velvet dress was donated to the museum by her widower Rodion Shchedrin.
Cardin called the great Russian ballerina his muse. They have been friends for decades. He gave Maya Plisetskaya a hundred outfits. First of all, concert dresses, costumes for the ballets of the Bolshoi Theater – Anna Karenina, Lady with a Dog, Spring Waters, The Seagull …
The Bakhrushinsky Museum has 15 stage costumes of Maya Plisetskaya.
The dress, which will be exhibited at the Plisetskaya Apartment Museum for only three days (from April 29 to May 1), was created for her Don Quixote gala performance at the Kremlin Palace in 2010.
– A shaped tren close to an oval is made of synthetic fabric with overflows – the outer part is green, the inner is burgundy, – said Anna Zakurdaeva, head of the department of the memorial and clothing fund of the Bakhrushinsky Museum. – A narrow green belt with a fastener with three metal buttons is sewn to the central part…
These details are of interest to narrow specialists. Well, the public is curious to look at the dress.
Mayai Plisetskaya was one of the most stylish women of her time. In the USSR, mainly ballet and circus artists went abroad. Plisetskaya was not a shopaholic, but she loved to shop, not only for herself. She liked the process itself. Trying on regular pumps or a jacket, she said: “These shoes (jacket) are just what I always dreamed of!”. Well, at home, I immediately put them aside. According to the recollections of her relatives, she wore heeled shoes everywhere, even going for walks in the foothills of the Alps. Not recognizing other shoes.
She preferred to dress with Pierre Cardin, with whom she was not only friends, but also greatly appreciated him as a fashion designer. And he treated Plisetskaya with no less reverence. Once, as the circumstances developed, she unexpectedly, by surprise, stopped at his Paris apartment opposite the Louvre. Cardin has not lived in this apartment for a long time. The house was deserted. But on Maya Plisetskaya’s “settlement” day, the world famous fashion designer came with a hammer and personally nailed the curtains to the dusty windows so that daylight would not interfere with his guest’s sleep.
When he created costumes for the performances of the great ballerina, he personally meticulously controlled every detail – down to the size of the line. Maya Mikhailovna recalled this in her book “I, Maya Plisetskaya …”. “Raise your foot into an arabesque, into an attitude. Bend over. Are you comfortable? The suit does not constrain movements? Do you feel it? It should be yours more than your own skin,” the fashion designer insisted.
Pierre Cardin designed ten costumes for Anna Karenina. One is better than the other. Real masterpieces. “They should be exhibited in museums,” Plisetskaya thought so. – The light scale divinely radiates. Black velvet with a plume of gas at the ball, lilac vignettes in the salon of Princess Betsy, white wings that slightly hide the naked body in the scene of Anna’s “fall”, a yellow cage with ostrich feathers at the “races”, the chocolate-brown range of the Wrede garden, the sky blue of the Italian happy pas de deux … I do not list all the costumes. And what dresses did Cardin make for “The Seagull”! .. And also – “Lady with a Dog”.
All theatrical dresses (and he also made her movie costumes) were his gift. For Plisetskaya sewed free of charge. Moreover, even on the poster of the Bolshoi Theater, Cardin’s name was not indicated at first. According to the ballerina, the USSR Ministry of Culture forbade the directorate of the theater to write the name of the French couturier in the list of authors of the play.
But he didn’t insist. It was important for him that he sews for the great Maya Plisetskaya. Time passed … When perestroika began in the USSR, glasnost reached the stage. First, on tour, they began to indicate the author of the costumes for the ballet Anna Karenina. Then the name of Pierre Cardin appeared in the program of the Bolshoi Theatre. And finally, in the summer of 1991, the grandiose show “40 Years in Fashion” took place on Red Square in Moscow.
