A new exhibition of outfits worn by generations of Russian emperors in the UK
In the reign of Henry VIII, an insouciant English visitor to the court of Ivan the Terrible failed to doff his hat to the Tsar. Ivan had it nailed to his head. He also beat his pregnant daughter for being inappropriately dressed and caused her to miscarry. The etiquette of dress really mattered. It was just as important in the courts of the barbaric Slavs as in genteel England, with all our disembowellings, burnings and beheadings.
For both the Tudors and the Tsars, wealth was power. The ostentation of power created authority. Wealth, power and authority were displayed by dress. Dress was governed by sumptuary legislation - restrictions on what could be worn by whom. And thus, by the laws of dress, extreme and deliberate social inequalities were displayed, stratified and enforced.
From fabrics and furs to the dishes and number of courses at meals, the quantities and qualities of wine and ale consumed and even in the places to eat and drink, every permutation was codified according to a minute social calculus. As fashions changed and new luxury materials were imported, constantly emended laws identified the latest micro-gradations of class. In the reign of Elizabeth I, cloth of gold, silver tissue and purple silk were reserved for royalty, earls, countesses and knights of the Garter. ("Viscountesses may wear cloth of gold or silver tinselled only in their kirtles.") Barons, baronesses, and Privy Councillors were allowed tinselled satin, silk embroidered with gold and silver and foreign woollen cloth. Gentlemen of the Queen's bedchamber, knights, and those with an income of 500 marks a year for life could splash out more modestly on gold or silver lace and carry swords, daggers and spurs damasked with gold and silver. And so on and on, down to the respectable working class clad in russet and kersey and the beggars in rags. Ermine and sable were a royal prerogative. Commoners kept warm in budge and coney (lamb's fur and rabbit skin) - if they could afford it.
In Russia the correlation of dress with status and power survived until the revolution of 1917. Magnificence of the Tsars: Ceremonial Men's Dress of the Russian Imperial Court, 1721-1917, opening next month at the V&A, displays its beauties and absurdities. Every year Russian nobles sold off hundreds of serfs to finance the display of wealth the court's authority relied on. The entire system depended on institutionalised slavery.
England's revolution predated the Russian by some three centuries, but scepticism had set in long before that. In Utopia, published in 1516, Thomas More deliberately uncoupled wealth from authority. The Utopians have no system of currency, and their abundant gold is degraded by its use - as prisoners' shackles, and, in the home, for potties and toddlers' toys. A simply engineered Pavlovian reflex, associating gold with criminality and dirt, reinforces More's stateless society, in which everyone is dressed in linen and wool, the equivalent of our classless denim.
More's hypothetical position was paralleled in practice by the English theatres. They destabilised the social hierarchies enforced by sumptuary laws because they equipped their wardrobes with passé cast-offs bought from the aspirant upper classes. Costumes were the theatres' most expensive investment. In the late-16th century, the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe spent as much on taffeta and tinsel for one woman's bodice as he advanced to Ben Jonson for a play.
Against the relative modesty of English practice, the extreme luxury of the Romanov dynasty's ceremonial attire - as seen in this exhibition - is an astonishing display of imperial bling. The only people avoiding the glitz seem to be the Tsars themselves. Most Romanov males were crowned wearing their military uniforms of sombre bottle green. Everyone else - from the coronation herald to the humblest postilion in the royal retinue - was togged out in gilt, silver and gold. Even at the very end of the 19th century, the herald, mounted on a white stallion, was dressed up in a medieval tabard of pure cloth of gold. Plus a quilted silk satin and moiré coat with gilt braid, musketeer-style red velvet hat with ostrich feathers, gold braid and tassels, tricolor satin sash and sword on a gold cross-belt.
The postilions cantered along in dashing black bumfreezer jackets, gilt-braided and embellished with 66 wholly unfunctional gilded heraldic buttons. Their dinky peaked riding caps were topped with an all-round gold fringe in pudding-bowl cut, Beatles style. Fashion students will find these whimsical court liveries a rich source of inspiration.
Like many autocrats, the Romanovs were anxious to impress their subjects and foreign visitors by their opulence, a signifier for the sanctity of rule. And, like later dictators, the Romanovs turned to the Romans for symbols of imperial might. The Roman eagle sprouted into the two-headed eagle of the Holy Roman, Byzantine and Russian empires. It is ubiquitous in Romanov regalia. Soon after the end of the Romanovs, the German single-headed eagle spread menacing wings over the Nazi swastika. More recently, a beige marble eagle, seemingly carved out of mortadella, straddles the doorway to one of Sadam Hussein's palaces.
The Romanovs had a little more imagination and classical learning than later imitators. In the early 18th century the coronation herald's livery boasted a fantastical pair of beribboned ornamental boots modelled on the laced patricians' boots, calcei patricii, of the later Roman empire, improbably topped with embroidered gilt lions' heads. Like the later heralds' anachronistic tabards and musketeer-style ostrich-feather hats, there is something slightly fatuous about this classical kitsch.
Fashions, uniforms and insignia have always furnished the royal toy-box. England's chubby Edward VII ("Tum-tum") made tweeds, Norfolk jackets and Homburg hats fashionable and pioneered a short-lived mode for trousers creased at the sides. Edward VIII introduced plus-fours to America.
The ruling Romanovs devoted comparable energy to the invention of military dress. An inferior officer once pointed out to Alexander I that his cuffs weren't fully buttoned as the regulations required. "Everything the Emperor does is in accordance with the regulations," Alexander replied. Since the emperor was the source of the rules, the answer was both axiomatic and tautologous, and the army officers hastily took to leaving their bottom cuff-buttons undone. When Alexander's son, Nicholas I, was crowned, his uniform jacket duly displayed exaggeratedly bell-bottomed, as-it-were-unbuttoned sleeves. The wide cuffs, trimmed with gold oak-leaves on a red ground, sported three button-holes but only the top two had buttons - a fashion sustained over the next three coronations and 70 years, to die out with the last Romanov emperor, Nicholas II.
This historical sweep, from Russia's first emperor to its last, is one of the attractions of this unexpectedly arresting exhibition. You would have thought that 300 years of male ceremonial dress would be pretty dull...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
For both the Tudors and the Tsars, wealth was power. The ostentation of power created authority. Wealth, power and authority were displayed by dress. Dress was governed by sumptuary legislation - restrictions on what could be worn by whom. And thus, by the laws of dress, extreme and deliberate social inequalities were displayed, stratified and enforced.
From fabrics and furs to the dishes and number of courses at meals, the quantities and qualities of wine and ale consumed and even in the places to eat and drink, every permutation was codified according to a minute social calculus. As fashions changed and new luxury materials were imported, constantly emended laws identified the latest micro-gradations of class. In the reign of Elizabeth I, cloth of gold, silver tissue and purple silk were reserved for royalty, earls, countesses and knights of the Garter. ("Viscountesses may wear cloth of gold or silver tinselled only in their kirtles.") Barons, baronesses, and Privy Councillors were allowed tinselled satin, silk embroidered with gold and silver and foreign woollen cloth. Gentlemen of the Queen's bedchamber, knights, and those with an income of 500 marks a year for life could splash out more modestly on gold or silver lace and carry swords, daggers and spurs damasked with gold and silver. And so on and on, down to the respectable working class clad in russet and kersey and the beggars in rags. Ermine and sable were a royal prerogative. Commoners kept warm in budge and coney (lamb's fur and rabbit skin) - if they could afford it.
In Russia the correlation of dress with status and power survived until the revolution of 1917. Magnificence of the Tsars: Ceremonial Men's Dress of the Russian Imperial Court, 1721-1917, opening next month at the V&A, displays its beauties and absurdities. Every year Russian nobles sold off hundreds of serfs to finance the display of wealth the court's authority relied on. The entire system depended on institutionalised slavery.
England's revolution predated the Russian by some three centuries, but scepticism had set in long before that. In Utopia, published in 1516, Thomas More deliberately uncoupled wealth from authority. The Utopians have no system of currency, and their abundant gold is degraded by its use - as prisoners' shackles, and, in the home, for potties and toddlers' toys. A simply engineered Pavlovian reflex, associating gold with criminality and dirt, reinforces More's stateless society, in which everyone is dressed in linen and wool, the equivalent of our classless denim.
More's hypothetical position was paralleled in practice by the English theatres. They destabilised the social hierarchies enforced by sumptuary laws because they equipped their wardrobes with passé cast-offs bought from the aspirant upper classes. Costumes were the theatres' most expensive investment. In the late-16th century, the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe spent as much on taffeta and tinsel for one woman's bodice as he advanced to Ben Jonson for a play.
Against the relative modesty of English practice, the extreme luxury of the Romanov dynasty's ceremonial attire - as seen in this exhibition - is an astonishing display of imperial bling. The only people avoiding the glitz seem to be the Tsars themselves. Most Romanov males were crowned wearing their military uniforms of sombre bottle green. Everyone else - from the coronation herald to the humblest postilion in the royal retinue - was togged out in gilt, silver and gold. Even at the very end of the 19th century, the herald, mounted on a white stallion, was dressed up in a medieval tabard of pure cloth of gold. Plus a quilted silk satin and moiré coat with gilt braid, musketeer-style red velvet hat with ostrich feathers, gold braid and tassels, tricolor satin sash and sword on a gold cross-belt.
The postilions cantered along in dashing black bumfreezer jackets, gilt-braided and embellished with 66 wholly unfunctional gilded heraldic buttons. Their dinky peaked riding caps were topped with an all-round gold fringe in pudding-bowl cut, Beatles style. Fashion students will find these whimsical court liveries a rich source of inspiration.
Like many autocrats, the Romanovs were anxious to impress their subjects and foreign visitors by their opulence, a signifier for the sanctity of rule. And, like later dictators, the Romanovs turned to the Romans for symbols of imperial might. The Roman eagle sprouted into the two-headed eagle of the Holy Roman, Byzantine and Russian empires. It is ubiquitous in Romanov regalia. Soon after the end of the Romanovs, the German single-headed eagle spread menacing wings over the Nazi swastika. More recently, a beige marble eagle, seemingly carved out of mortadella, straddles the doorway to one of Sadam Hussein's palaces.
The Romanovs had a little more imagination and classical learning than later imitators. In the early 18th century the coronation herald's livery boasted a fantastical pair of beribboned ornamental boots modelled on the laced patricians' boots, calcei patricii, of the later Roman empire, improbably topped with embroidered gilt lions' heads. Like the later heralds' anachronistic tabards and musketeer-style ostrich-feather hats, there is something slightly fatuous about this classical kitsch.
Fashions, uniforms and insignia have always furnished the royal toy-box. England's chubby Edward VII ("Tum-tum") made tweeds, Norfolk jackets and Homburg hats fashionable and pioneered a short-lived mode for trousers creased at the sides. Edward VIII introduced plus-fours to America.
The ruling Romanovs devoted comparable energy to the invention of military dress. An inferior officer once pointed out to Alexander I that his cuffs weren't fully buttoned as the regulations required. "Everything the Emperor does is in accordance with the regulations," Alexander replied. Since the emperor was the source of the rules, the answer was both axiomatic and tautologous, and the army officers hastily took to leaving their bottom cuff-buttons undone. When Alexander's son, Nicholas I, was crowned, his uniform jacket duly displayed exaggeratedly bell-bottomed, as-it-were-unbuttoned sleeves. The wide cuffs, trimmed with gold oak-leaves on a red ground, sported three button-holes but only the top two had buttons - a fashion sustained over the next three coronations and 70 years, to die out with the last Romanov emperor, Nicholas II.
This historical sweep, from Russia's first emperor to its last, is one of the attractions of this unexpectedly arresting exhibition. You would have thought that 300 years of male ceremonial dress would be pretty dull...