Barbara Karinska: The Woman from Kharkiv Who Dressed the World
By Matthew Parish
Wednesday 30 September 2026
There is something characteristic of Kharkiv in the story of Barbara Karinska. She was born there in 1886, into a prosperous merchant family, at a time when the city was developing the peculiar mixture of industry, commerce, scholarship and culture that would subsequently make it one of the great intellectual centres of eastern Ukraine. She would travel from Kharkiv to Moscow, Brussels, Paris, London and New York, and eventually become one of the most influential costume designers in the history of ballet. Yet the foundations of her art were laid in Kharkiv, in the embroidery traditions and commercial sophistication of the family into which she was born.
Her Ukrainian name was Varvara Andriivna Zhmudska, although the world would eventually know her as Barbara Karinska, Madame Karinska or simply Karinska. She was born on 3 October 1886, the third of ten children and the eldest daughter of Andrii Zhmudsky, a wealthy Kharkiv merchant. She attended the D. D. Obolenska girls’ gymnasium, one of the city’s better schools for young women, and appears in the records of the law faculty of Imperial Kharkiv University for the academic year 1907–1908 as an external student, under her married name Moiseienko. For a woman in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century, this was already an unusual trajectory.
The house associated with her childhood still stands at 19 Chobotarska Street. Records from 1901 identify the property as belonging to Maria Zhmudska, Barbara’s mother, and local historians consider it likely that Barbara was born there or at least spent her childhood in the building. It is an intriguing Kharkiv connection because Karinska’s later international fame can make her seem like a creature of Paris or New York. In fact her story began amid the brick streets, merchant houses and vigorous commercial culture of late nineteenth-century Kharkiv.
The importance of this background should not be underestimated. Karinska grew up around textiles and learnt Ukrainian embroidery as a child. Long before she entered the professional theatre, she therefore understood something fundamental about cloth: that fabric is not merely material from which clothes are made. It has weight, tension, colour, movement and personality. Anyone who has watched a dancer turn rapidly across a stage will understand why these things matter. A costume that looks magnificent when stationary may become disastrous when somebody has to dance in it.
Karinska’s early adult life was complicated, as were the lives of so many Europeans who happened to be born around the end of the nineteenth century. Marriage, widowhood, remarriage, revolution and political upheaval repeatedly changed her circumstances. She eventually moved to Moscow, where she established herself in embroidery and fashion. Following the Bolshevik Revolution she managed, for a time, the peculiar balancing act required of independent creative people under the emerging Soviet system, operating an embroidery school and dressing members of the new elite.
Eventually she left. In 1928 she emigrated, initially to Brussels and thereafter to Paris. This was the decisive transformation in her life. Karinska was already in her forties, an age at which conventional biographies often imagine that people’s careers have acquired their permanent form. Hers had barely begun. Paris introduced her to the extraordinary world of European modernism, Russian émigré culture, theatre and ballet.
Her talent was peculiarly suited to this environment. Karinska was not merely somebody who could sew exceptionally well. She possessed the much rarer ability to translate an artist’s visual imagination into something that could actually be worn by a human being. Theatre designers might produce magnificent sketches, but sketches do not have to survive perspiration, rapid movement, repeated performances, washing, repairs and the brutal practicalities of backstage life. Karinska understood both sides of the equation: fantasy and engineering.
In 1933 she made costumes for George Balanchine’s Cotillion, beginning one of the most important creative partnerships in twentieth-century ballet. Balanchine understood choreography as movement stripped increasingly of unnecessary theatrical clutter. Karinska understood that costumes should operate according to the same principle. Clothing should reveal movement rather than obstruct it. Fabric could become part of the choreography itself.
The relationship eventually became extraordinary in scale. Karinska worked on some 75 Balanchine ballets. The San Francisco Ballet describes her as one of the great visionaries who shaped twentieth-century ballet and records Balanchine’s assessment that he attributed half the success of the ballets she dressed to Karinska herself. This was not the casual compliment of a choreographer to a seamstress. It was an acknowledgement that choreography and costume had become mutually dependent arts.
Karinska eventually settled in the United States in 1938. New York became her principal professional home, although Hollywood also discovered her talents. There she reached a distinction that must have seemed improbable for a girl born into a Kharkiv merchant household under the Russian Empire: she won an Academy Award for the costumes for Joan of Arc, the 1948 film starring Ingrid Bergman. She subsequently received another Academy Award nomination for Hans Christian Andersen.
Yet Hollywood glamour was arguably less important than what she did to the tutu.
This apparently frivolous garment is in fact a piece of engineering. Traditional pancake tutus were comparatively rigid structures. They could restrict dancers, bounce awkwardly during movement and interfere with choreography. During her work with Balanchine, Karinska developed what became known as the “powder-puff” tutu, constructed using multiple layers of softer netting and dispensing with the rigid hoop characteristic of earlier designs. The result moved more naturally with the dancer while retaining the extraordinary visual geometry that makes the classical tutu instantly recognisable.
The innovation tells us something about Karinska herself. She did not revolutionise ballet by announcing that everything preceding her was obsolete. She changed it by understanding tradition so thoroughly that she could see precisely where tradition was getting in the way. This is often how the most enduring forms of innovation work. They appear almost obvious after somebody has invented them.
Karinska also developed the knee-length chiffon ballet dress associated with works such as Allegro Brillante, another form that became a standard of modern ballet costume. Her designs permitted Balanchine’s dancers to move with the speed and freedom his choreography demanded while preserving elegance and theatrical spectacle. The dancer was not placed inside the costume. The costume danced with her.
This is perhaps why Karinska deserves to be understood as more than a dressmaker, however distinguished. She belonged to that fascinating category of creative people whose work occupies the frontier between art and technology. She understood materials, human anatomy, movement, colour and stage lighting. A ballet costume has to be beautiful from the stalls, durable in the wardrobe and comfortable on the body of an athlete performing movements that ordinary clothing was never designed to accommodate.
There is another reason why Kharkiv should remember her. The twentieth century repeatedly scattered the city’s people across the world. Revolutions, Stalinism, war, occupation, political repression and economic upheaval sent generations of Kharkiv artists, scientists, writers and intellectuals elsewhere. Their subsequent achievements were often absorbed into the national stories of the countries in which they eventually lived. The result is that Kharkiv sometimes appears to have lost possession of its own children.
Karinska provides an unusually attractive opportunity to correct that historical distortion. She unquestionably became an international figure. Paris helped create her career, New York provided her greatest stage and Hollywood gave her an Oscar. Nevertheless she began in Kharkiv, where the skills that eventually made her famous had their origins.
The city has increasingly reclaimed her memory. A Kharkiv street was named after Barbara Karinska in 2015, replacing its Soviet-era association with the French communist Marcel Cachin. In August 2026, the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts opened the documentary and artistic exhibition Great Compatriots: Barbara Karinska to commemorate the 140th anniversary of her birth. It brought together archival materials, photographs, theatrical costumes, portraits and stage-design work, thereby returning Karinska symbolically to the city from which her extraordinary journey began.
There is an appealing symmetry to this. Soviet history specialised in changing the names of streets and obscuring inconvenient inheritances. Modern Kharkiv has gradually been doing the opposite: rediscovering the people who made the city interesting before ideological conformity attempted to flatten its past. Karinska belongs naturally within that restoration of memory.
She died in New York in 1983 at the age of 97, after a career that had taken her from Ukrainian embroidery to Parisian modernism, Broadway, Hollywood and the New York City Ballet. Her final Balanchine production was Vienna Waltzes in 1977. By then the girl from Kharkiv had spent half a century changing the appearance of performers upon some of the world’s most celebrated stages.
There are grander forms of cultural achievement and there are certainly louder ones. Karinska’s genius consisted in something deceptively modest: she understood how cloth should move around a human body. From that knowledge she created objects of remarkable beauty and solved practical problems that had troubled dancers for generations.
Kharkiv is conventionally celebrated as a city of engineers, scientists, architects, writers and industrialists. Barbara Karinska reminds us that these categories need not be kept apart. She was an artist who thought like an engineer and a craftswoman whose craftsmanship became art. The stages of New York may have made her famous, but something recognisably Kharkivian travelled with her: ingenuity, technical seriousness, cosmopolitanism and the conviction that things can always be made a little better than they were before.
And whenever the curtain rises upon dancers wearing the kind of costume she helped invent, a small piece of Kharkiv still moves with them.
