When the Ballets Russes boarded Le Train Bleu (The Blue Train) in 1924, the quintessentially modern Coco Chanel was the perfect choice as costumier. Her simple, spirited designs provided a carefree invocation of seaside, active chic at a time when sportswear was a relatively new category of clothing. Le Train’s cast of wayfaring sporting champions (including a golfer inspired by the Princes of Wales) and ladies of leisure spun a seaside pantomime out of a gymnastic-classical ballet tightrope.  Their costumes – black tank bathing tops, striped wool jerseys, culottes and muted tunic dresses accessorised with bathing caps like nubile petals – reflected the spirit of a libertarian age. The influence of Coco Chanel’s designs in her penultimate production for Russes are echoed today in Chanel’s 2010 Resort collection.

Le Train Bleu takes place amidst the French Riviera circa 1920s, an era where populist visions of a modernist utopia gave rise to the cult of the body beautiful. Choreographer Bronislava Nijinska satirised this shift towards shallower lifestyles using Chanel’s sporting ensembles as a fashion conduit. Indeed legend has it that Coco was credited with making suntans fashionable in Europe, following a run-in with the sun while yachting on the Riviera.

Le Train was a definitively Russes collaboration, with Jean Cocteau as librettist and Pablo Picasso fulfilling the rather specific role of curtain painter. Jean Cocteau envisaged the ballet as a series of vignettes filled with all the things you might see on the front of a postcard sent from France circa 1924  (jets falling out of the sky, maillots, chorus lines, movie cameras). When I think of Le Train Bleu I imagine rosy women and men with shoulders like boulders racing seaside together, trying to catch the first wave of salacious gossip as it crashes and breaks onto the shore…

In 2009 Karl Lagerfield kept the Ballet-Fashion dream alive by designing the costume for English National Ballet’s Elena Glurdjidze’s performance of The Dying Swan.