margotfonteyns: Marie Rambert and Frederick Ashton in A Tragedy of Fashion at the Lyric Theatre, Ham
margotfonteyns: Marie Rambert and Frederick Ashton in A Tragedy of Fashion at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 1926 The ballet was Ashton’s first work as a choreographer and came about when Marie Rambert was forced to parry some casual sexism from her husband, who had suggested that the only subjects fit for women were food and fashion–both of which were far too trivial to have any importance to a man. Marie reminded her husband of the famous French chef and maitre d’, François Vatel, who, during a dinner for Louis XIV, committed suicide because the fish hadn’t arrived; she further countered that no woman would be absurd enough to take her own life merely to preserve the honour of haute cuisine–or, for that matter, of haute couture. Thus, the idea was born of a dress designer whose inflated sense of professional importance also drives him to suicide (in this case, by impaling himself with a giant pair of sewing scissors). Ashton was chosen to dance the role of the couturier while Rambert herself danced the part of a cigar-chomping fashion model. The original choreographer was to be Frances James, but such was Ashton’s abundance of ideas for original movements concerning his own part that Rambert persuaded him to do the entire ballet himself. Ashton at first wanted Coco Chanel to design the dresses, but this was considered on the ambitious side by Rambert, who instead commissioned a young Russian girl she had seen sketching at Enrico Cecchetti’s studio during rehearsals of the Ballets Russes. Her name was Sophie Fedorovitch, and over the next three decades she would work as a designer on eleven of Ashton’s ballets, becoming, in his own words, ‘not only my dearest friend but my greatest artistic collaborator and adviser’. A Tragedy of Fashion debuted on June 15, 1926 as part of a larger revue, ‘Riverside Nights’, and Ashton would later describe it as no more than a frivolous trifle, but it was a decisive step forward in his own career and in the ultimate formation of an English national ballet. -- source link