Details

Object type

tutu

Artist/Maker

Jasper Conran designer

Date

1995

Materials

synthetic, feather

Description

Woman’s ballet tutu in white velvet, net and feathers. White velvet bodice with v-shaped décolletage in-filled with small panel of flesh-coloured gauze, trimmed with wide border of white velvet feather shapes with embroidered silver outlines appliquéd on and finished with pearlised beads, bugle beads and clear sequins. Sleeveless with elastic shoulder straps. Fastens centre back. with a row of hooks and eyes over a buckram tape waistband fastening with two large hooks and eyes. Classical-style tutu skirt of layered white net with Van Dyked edge with inverted v-shape panel of white velvet and gauze feather shapes with embroidered silver outlines appliquéd on and finished with pearlised beads, bugle beads and clear sequins at centre front, and ostrich feather ‘wings’ either side, and inverted v-shape panel with lines of bugle beads at centre back. Cloth label centre back 'Jane Johnson Costumes. Name – Miss Chadwick. Character – Odette. Production – Swan Lake'.

Swan Lake is a classical ballet originally created for the Ballet of the Moscow Imperial Bolshoi Theatre in 1877 with music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Most modern versions are based on the revival by the Imperial Ballet at the Marinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, which was choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov in 1895. The ballet is famous for the lead ballerina playing the dual role of Odette, a princess transformed into a white swan by the sorcerer Von Rothbart and his daughter Odile.

This tutu was worn by Fiona Chadwick as Odette in Scottish Ballet’s production of Swan Lake created by Galina Samsova in 1995. Jasper Conran, who had previously done the costumes for Scottish Ballet’s The Sleeping Beauty the previous year, designed the costumes. Sophie Constanti’s review in The Independent on 31 March 1995 remarked on Conran’s ‘painstaking attention to the cut and fabric of each garment’. In this case the short net tutu, made to Conran’s design by Jane Johnson, is topped with white ostrich feathers to form ‘wings’. Some of the costumes were so elaborate that members of the Glasgow branch of the Embroiderers’ Guild were drafted in to help. The tutu was purchased from the Scottish Ballet sale in 2007.

Credit Line/Donor

Purchase funded by the Glasgow Museums Purchase Fund 2007/8

ID Number

E.2007.12.20

Location

In storage