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 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 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.