The heroine of Yanina Couture of SS16 Collection was a young girl — a romantic dreamer, inspired by passion for ballet. Ballet runs through every detail of the collection: weightless dresses with piles of ballet tutus, and hats, like those worn by Anna Pavlova and Ida Rubinstein in 1910’s, embroidery, taffeta, veil, tulle and velvet.
In the contemporary cultural context the newly refined and gentle image of a Russian girl is actual again. That is not outspoken beauty, but restraint, intelligent, aristocratism and dreaminess.
The collection has a strong cultural base: literature, painting and ballet. From painting, we took diffuse, smoky gamut with smooth passages, from ballet – weightless dresses and movements of semi-transparent layers, from literature – intelligent dreaminess and clarity of images.
Our dresses are like flowers fallen from the stem… That`s the way fashion illustrator Georges Barbier characterized the great ballerina Anna Pavlova in the 20’s.
Love for Russia and France is joined together: our heroine is brought up on Russian classics and the French novels simultaneously, loves impressionist paintings and Diaghilev’s “Russian seasons”. The collection has become a kind of dedication to these historical and aesthetic links between Russia and France with a declination of colors from pearl grey to powdery pink.
Perhaps the image that mostly inspired me while I was creating the collection was “The Swan Princess” by Mikhail Vrubel. Especially it affected the final “wedding” image: elegant pearl- grey fabric and a silver veil, a cloud of shades and reminiscent of wings embroidery – all that was inspired by the mysterious, mesmerizing image of The Swan Princess.
The bird image has always been a landmark for Yanina Couture fashion house, and as this collection is largely devoted to the ballet, this bird is surely a Swan. It`s the fragile princess, “the dying Swan” Anna Pavlova or Maya Plisetskaya, pastel silhouette from Serov’s sketch for the ballet “Les Sylphides.”
By the way, the first image of the collection will become that of a swan: a friend of the brand, beautiful Deborah Hung will appear in a gown of white feathers with a red ruby at her heart. The story told in this collection turned out to be very personal. It is in some way autobiographical: love for ballet, and the fascination with Russian art and French Impressionists, and romantic reverie… on the other hand, these are things that are very recognizable, understandable and loved by many people. I think this language is clear to everyone.
I am pleased that the ideals of beauty of the past are actual again. The collection contains many references to the past: classical 19th century that is the century of aristocratic culture, and the 1910’s and 20’s, when the Russian emigration flooded Europe. At the same time, we stripped our dresses of excessive historicism and adapted the aesthetics pleasing to us under the modern requirements.
