Barbara Karinska

Varvara Jmoudsky, better known as Barbara Karinska or simply Karinska (October 3, 1886 – October 18, 1983), was the Oscar-winning costumier of cinema, ballet, musical and dramatic theatre, lyric opera and ice spectacles. Over her 50-year career, that began at age 41, Karinska earned legendary status time and again through her continuing collaborations with stage designers including Christian Bérard, André Derain, Irene Sharaff, Raoul Pêne du Bois and Cecil Beaton; performer-producers Louis Jouvet and Sonja Henie; ballet producers René Blum, Colonel de Basil and Serge Denham. Her longest and most renown collaboration was with choreographer George Balanchine for more than seventy ballets — the first known to be “The Celebrated Popoff Porcelain,” a one act ballet for Nikita Balieff's 1929 La Chauve-Souris with music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky for which Karinska executed the costumes design by Sergey Tchekhonin. She began to design costumes for Balanchine ballets in 1949 with Emmanuel Chabrier's “Bourrèe Fantasque,” for the newly founded New York City Ballet. Their final collaboration was the 1977 "Vienna Waltzes.” Balanchine and Karinska together developed the American (or powder puff) tutu ballet costume[9] which became an international costume standard.

With Dorothy Jeakins, she won the 1948 Oscar for color costume design (the first year costume design was divided into color and black & white categories) for Joan of Arc, and was nominated in 1952 for the Samuel Goldwyn musical Hans Christian Andersen, starring Danny Kaye. She was the first costume designer to win the Capezio Dance Award, in 1962, for costumes "of visual beauty for the spectator and complete delight for the dancer".

Karinska divided her time between homes in Manhattan, Sandisfield, Massachusetts, and Domrémy-la-Pucelle, France, the birthplace of Joan of Arc.

Barbara Karinska was born Varvara Andriivna Jmudska (Ukrainian: Варвара Андріївна Жмудськa) in 1886, in the city of Kharkiv, Russian Empire (now in Ukraine). She was baptized in the Orthodox Church. Her father was a wealthy wholesaler of cotton goods, philanthropist and city father. She was the third and eldest female of the ten Jmoudsky siblings. Karinska learned Victorian embroidery as a child from her German and Swiss governesses. She studied law at Kharkiv Imperial University. In 1907, she married Alexander Moiseenko, the son of another wealthy Kharkiv merchant. Moiseenko died in 1909 several months before the birth of their daughter Irina. In 1910, Varvara's older brother Anatoly, owner of the moderately Socialist Kharkiv newspaper Utro (Morning), went through divorce proceedings that resulted in Varvara winning custody of his two-year-old son, her nephew, Vladimir Anatolevich Jmoudsky. Vladimir and Irina were raised as brother and sister.^{[citation needed]}

Varvara remarried a prominent lawyer, Nikolai Sergeevich Karinsky (N.S. Karinsky, 1873–1948), from Moscow, who was residing in Kharkiv. With his law practice burgeoning, the Karinsky family of four moved to Moscow in 1916, to a spacious apartment that Varvara had purchased. Karinsky continued to practice criminal and political law and gained fame and prestige throughout the Russian Empire. Varvara, meanwhile, became totally engrossed in the arts and hosted her famous salon every night after the theater or ballet. She developed her own form of painting applying pieces of colored silk gauze to photographs and drawings. Her first subjects were ballet scenes. After much tearing apart and redoing, she exhibited about 12 of her works in a prominent Moscow gallery and was quite successful both financially and critically.

Czar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917. In May, 1917, under the Provisional Government, Nikolai Karinsky was appointed Prosecutor of the St. Petersburg Court of Justice. He and Varvara resided in the capital several months, leaving the children in the care of their governess in Moscow.

Following the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, Varvara, Irina and Vladimir spent the years of the Civil War moving between Kharkiv and Crimea. Karinsky who held posts off and on as prosecutor under the White government of the South joined them sporadically.

As 1920 began, Varvara and the children were living in Yalta. In February Karinsky was appointed Deputy Minister of the Interior of the South Russian Government with headquarters in Novorossiysk. With the fall of Crimea to the Red forces in October of that year, Karinsky was a marked man. Unable to find his family, several of Varvara's sisters and brothers forced him to leave Crimea with them by ship, assuring him that Varvara would soon follow. But Varvara had decided to remain in Crimea.