Costumes of the Belle Epoque. The new display in the Costume Gallery

“The Hermitage’s rich costume collection has imperceptibly changed into a whole Institute of the History of Costume with its own programme, unique method of showing things in a special display space, with the exceptional achievements of the restorers and striking innovative exhibitions. Today a new stage in that development is being presented. It’s time to think about additional premises,” Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, commented.

Within the periodization of the Modern Era, the “Belle Epoque” remains one of the least firmly fixed definitions borrowed from the history of culture. People usually reckon that Belle Epoque begins in the 1890s, although in a broad historical context it starts two decades earlier, back in the 1870s.

The thematic display in the Costume Gallery provides an overview of European fashion over 50 years, beginning with the eclectic outfits with highly complex cut and elaborate decoration produced by history’s first-ever couturier – Charles Worth, and finishing with a far less fussy dress by Paul Poiret, a champion of the natural beauty of the female body and passionate opponent of corsets. The distinctive characteristics and evolution of tendencies in Belle Epoque fashion design can be traced through the examples of everyday and evening ensembles worn by the last Russian empresses, Maria Feodorovna and Alexandra Feodorovna, other members of the imperial family and their immediate circle, with many of the costumes going on show for the first time.

The author of the display is Nina Ivanovna Tarasova, Candidate of Historical Sciences, Head of the Applied Art Sector in the State Hermitage’s Department of the History of Russian Culture.

Its designer is Yury Suchkov.

The “Costumes of the Belle Epoque” display can be visited as part of a (Russian-language) guided tour around the open-storage route of the Staraya Derevnya Restoration and Storage Centre.

More about the display

The open-storage space of the Costume Gallery is divided into two zones: for the permanent and temporary (thematic) displays.

On the basis of works of decorative and applied art of the 17th to early 21st centuries from the stocks of the Department of the History of Russian Culture, a sort of costume “timeline” has been constructed in the permanent display zone, something unparalleled in museum practice in this country. Acting as a prologue to this is a podium presenting Orthodox church vestments of the 18th and 19th centuries with a silhouette, specifics of style and strict purpose that are immune to the influence of time and fashion.

The aim of the display is to visually present the evolution of European costume over the course of 350 years, to track the changing silhouette of male and female clothing, as well as the main tendencies and the cyclical character of fashion, to tell about famous fashion houses and celebrated couturiers, about reforms and revolutions in costume, about the links that costume and fashion have with economics, politics, scientific and technological advances, about how fashion has been influenced by religion, literature and art. The permanent costume display zone envisages the periodical rotation of items that may be sent to a temporary exhibition or the Hermitage’s Laboratory for the Scientific Restoration of Fabrics, or else simply for a “rest” in a closed storeroom.

As well as dresses and accessories, the new display includes objects without which it is impossible to imagine clothing being produced: vintage threads, needle cases, scissors, sewing machines, buttons, needlework boxes, fashion magazines and dummies.

The temporary display zone in the Costume Gallery provides the opportunity to cast light on some particular aspect of fashion or an individual period in its history. In 2024, the thematic section of the Gallery will be presenting costumes from the era known as the “Belle Epoque”.

The term “Belle Epoque” (literally “Beautiful Epoch”) emerged around 1919 (by other accounts, in the late 1930s) and was originally applied chiefly to France and Belgium, before being extended to include Britain, Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary. Western Europe, exhausted and tormented by the First World War, suddenly recognized the joys of a peaceful life and, looking back, came to nostalgically regard the few decades in its history between 1871 and 1914 as a time of prosperity and of unprecedented scientific and technical, economic and cultural progress, although that period was in actual fact far from unclouded for the European continent. In the cultural history of the Russian Empire, the era from the 1880s–90s to the mid-1910s has become known as the “Silver Age”, a term that, like “Belle Epoque”, entered into widespread use many years after the end of the war and the revolution in 1917.

The new thematic display in the Costume Gallery pays a tribute of respect and commemoration to the Hermitage curator and outstanding textile researcher Tamara Timofeyevna Korshunova (1929–2019), the author of the Soviet Union’s first monograph about costume, which has been translated into many European languages (English edition: The Art of Costume in Russia: 18th to Early 20th Century. Leningrad, 1979), an energetic gatherer of the collection of costume and accessories, the organizer of this country’s first museum exhibitions about fashion and fashion designers – “Costume of the Silver Age in Russia. 1890–1914” (1993), “Law-Maker of European Fashion. Works of Charles Worth and His Fashion House in the Hermitage Collection” (2000) and “Outstanding Russian Fashion Designer: Nadejda P. Lamanova” (2002), and a researcher into the history of the Saint Petersburg Tapestry Factory.