♕ Day 6: Favourite Dress/outfit
Nicholas and Alexandra’s 1903 Winter Palace Ball costumes were probably the most complex outfits the Imperial couple have ever worn. The outfits were so heavy and with the Alexandra’s crown on, she couldn’t even turn her head. The outfits were based on the era of Nicholas’s favorite past Romanov Tsar, Alexei, who symbolised pre-Westernised Russia in the 17th-century. The guests commissioned their costumes from important tailoring and dressmaking workshops in Moscow and St Petersburg, especially from the studios of St Petersburg’s imperial theaters.
Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich recalled the occasion as “the last spectacular ball in the history of the empire…[but] a new and hostile Russia glared through the large windows of the palace…while we danced, the workers were striking and the clouds in the Far East were hanging dangerously low.” The entire Imperial family, the Tsar as Alexei I, the Tsarina as Maria Miloslavskaya, all dressed in rich 17th century attire, posed in the Hermitage’s theatre, for what was to be their final photograph together.
(via enigmaland)
I’m reading The Akhmatova Journals: Volume I by Lydia Chukovskaya, and I can already say that I recommend it to anyone interested in Akhmatova or Soviet Russia, especially during the 1930s-40s. Also, it’s adding to my growing need/desire to read more of Pushkin, but in a somewhat selfish way- so that I can read, with more insight, Akhmatova’s writings concerning his work.
