Costume worn by Ruth Ann Koesun (1928–2018) in Mikhail Fokine’s Les Sylphides

Lucinda Ballard created this design for the first season of Ballet Theatre (now the American Ballet Theatre) in 1940, and it has remained in repertory ever since. She took inspiration from an earlier costume that Léon Bakst (1866–1924) designed for the ballet’s premiere in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1907. Both costumes evoked the ballets blancs of the Romantic era, in which the dancers were exclusively dressed in white and embodied magical creatures such as nymphs and sylphs. Ballard won the first Tony Award for Costume Design in 1947 and was nominated for an Academy Award for her work on the 1951 film A Streetcar Named Desire. The wearer of this costume, Ruth Ann Koesun, was one of the first Asian-American principal dancers of Ballet Theatre. The daughter of a Chinese physician and a Russian-American mother, Koesun received her ballet training in Chicago and joined Ballet Theatre in 1946. Her frequent partner, including for Les Sylphides, was fellow Chicagoan John Kriza. Koesun’s lyrical style of dancing particularly suited the Chopin score of Les Sylphides, and it was one of the defining works of her career.