“There was always a feeling that Russia slipped past the Art Deco era. This exhibition shows that it did not do so entirely. We have some excellent collections, and through the lens of those one can discover the motifs of this interesting style in this country’s culture as well, and in architecture, and the cinema. One more indication of the usefulness of museum study,” Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, commented.
Anna Meleshina, Managing Director of the Magnit retail chain, said: “Our mission within the framework of partnership with the Hermitage is to bring the world of high art closer to mass culture and to make it more accessible, so as to change the world for the better. That approach is reflected by the new exhibition that has opened in the Hermitage with the support of Magnit Kosmetik – the largest chain of drugstores in Russia offering a host of beauty and self-care products. After all, fashion, to which the exhibition is devoted, is a sphere where art meets with the everyday, and its very existence is impossible without those two elements.”
The main block of exhibits, numbering over 400 items, consists of beaded dresses and shoes from that time. The clothing on view includes articles produced by celebrated Western European fashion designers such as Paul Poiret, Jeanne Lanvin, Mariano Fortuny, Edward Molyneux and Lucien Lelong. The collection of footwear features the creations of prominent shoe designers: Pietro Yantorny, André Perugia, Israel Miller, Salvatore Ferragamo, Hellstern & Sons, Netch et Frater, Francois Pinet, Saks Fifth Avenue and many others. Visitors are also invited to explore the collection of celluloid heels – a distinctive type of Art Deco shoe accessory, the manufacture of which was elevated to the level of art in France.
Also on display are gems from the Hermitage’s collection of paintings and drawings from that period: works by Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy, Erté and other artists. The display is augmented by 1920s film posters from the Hermitage’s stock of artistic prints.
The exhibition has been prepared by the State Hermitage, with the participation of Nazim Mustafayev (Saint Petersburg), the Technical Museum of Vadim Zadorozhny (Moscow region) and other private collections.
The exhibition’s curator is Nina Tarasova, head of the Applied Art Sector in the State Hermitage’s Department of the History of Russian Culture.
The exhibition’s designers are Yury Suchkov and Emil Kapelush.
The project co-ordinator is Svetlana Datsenko, advisor to the General Director of the State Hermitage
An illustrated publication (in Russian) has been prepared to accompany the exhibition (State Hermitage Publishing House, 2025). The texts are by Nina Tarasova and Nazim Mustafayev.
The exhibition can be visited by all holders of entrance tickets to the Main Museum Complex until 7 September 2025.
More about the exhibition
A hundred years ago, on 28 April 1925, the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels moderne opened in Paris, an exhibition in which several dozen European and Asian countries participated. It marked the beginning of the triumphant progress of a new artistic style that supplanted the Art Nouveau and was visibly present everywhere – in architecture, painting and sculpture, in the design of clothing, vehicles and domestic appliances, in the patterns of expensive jewellery and book illustrations. This style, which the great French architect Le Corbusier was the first to term “art déco”, shaped the very way of life of people in the interwar period who were in the grip of the industry of entertainment and mass consumption.
On the 100th anniversary of the Parisian exposition, the State Hermitage is opening an exhibition devoted to European and American fashion of the 1920s and early 1930s. one of the most striking and significant manifestations of the Art Deco style. The expression “a pocketful of dreams” used in its title, which characterizes many spheres of life at that time with vivid precision, is borrowed from a work by the contemporary Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan – Understanding Media The extensions of man. The exhibition features some outstanding works of figurative art of the period from the stocks of the Hermitage, costumes and accessories from the extensive collection of Nazim Mustafayev and other private collections.
Art Deco fashion was influenced by the classics and the contemporary world, the history of ancient civilizations and Russian ballet, the East and the achievements of technological progress, but above all by fresh perceptions of peaceful life. The First World War radically changed women, who in many fields replaced the men who had gone off to the front and put on for the first time overalls, breeches and leggings, masculine-style jackets with pockets and loose shortened skirts. Comfortable, simple female costume with a fashionable straight silhouette came within practically everyone’s reach.
People were helped to forget about the hardships of daily life at least for a time and immerse themselves in a world of dreams by the cinema with its imaginary settings of rich mansions, parties in opulent drawing rooms, where young women with bobbed hair and heavy makeup, with slender boyish figures wearing revealing dresses and high-heeled shoes, defying all :”standards of decency”, gyrated to the latest rhythms. America and Europe were gripped by a postwar dancing “epidemic” – the Charleston, foxtrot, tango and shimmy. Neon signs lured the public into bars, cinemas and dance clubs. Sporting an evening dress embellished with rhinestones, beads and bugles, a woman there might feel like a Hollywood starlet.
Art Deco creations perfectly conveyed the general mood of balancing between euphoria that the Great War was finally over and the expected inevitability of another, even more terrible, cataclysm.
It will be of particular interest to discover the first-rate collection of beaded dresses, footwear and other fashion accessories from the 1920s and early 1930s that has been made available for the exhibition in the Hermitage by the collector and researcher Nazim Mustafayev.
The display also includes an automobile of the Buick 44 series manufactured in the USA in 1929–30. The best-selling car had an engine capacity of 81 horsepower and a top speed of 145 km/h or 90 mph. Production of the model stopped in 1930, and this is the only example in Russia. It comes from the collection of the Technical Museum of Vadim Zadorozhny and provides a further striking example of Art Deco design in the Hermitage exhibition.
In presenting the events of socio-political and artistic life in the 1920s–30s through fashion, the exhibition touches upon the important question of the genesis of illusions in the life of whole generations and the individual person, and that aspect is brought out by the designers’ treatment of the display.
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