Backstage with Erté: Fashion, Fantasy, and the Decorative Age

When Roman Petrovich Tyrtov boarded a train from St. Petersburg to Paris in 1912, he did so under a false name. Not out of scandal, but strategy. “Tyrtov” was the name of his noble Russian family, a lineage filled with naval officers and high-level civil servants. The arts were not considered a respectable career and no son of theirs would dream of pursuing such a debauched path. Or so they thought.

The young artist disguised himself under a pseudonym derived from his initials when spoken in French – R.T. And so the world met Erté. Paris was the obvious destination. It was the centre of fashion, theatre, and emerging modernism, and Erté was determined to insert himself into all of it. Just twenty years old, he carried with him a portfolio of exquisite costume sketches and a singular vision: to drape the modern woman not in reality, but in fantasy.

Within a year, he had secured work with the legendary couturier Paul Poiret, who had already made waves with his kimono-inspired coats, turbans, and harem pants. Poiret believed fashion should be a spectacle, a theatre of opulence. It was a philosophy Erté wholeheartedly shared. While his time at Poiret’s atelier was brief, it introduced him to a world where the female form was both canvas and character.

By the 1910s, Erté was illustrating for Journal des Dames et des Modes and later became a contributor to Harper’s Bazaar, where he had over 200 covers published between 1915 and 1937. These covers did more than showcase clothes, they defined a whole new aesthetic. His figures were impossibly elongated, aloof, and draped in fabrics that defied gravity and logic. They posed not like women on the street, but like performers in a grand ballet.

His contemporaries in Paris included Picasso, Braque, and later, the Surrealists. But Erté was never part of those avant-garde circles. Where they deconstructed the world, Erté constructed a whole new other. His art was decorative, but not frivolous. It was stylised, but never static. And while critics often dismissed his work as superficial or commercial, his enduring influence in fashion illustration and costume design tells a different story. And anyway, what’s wrong with being commercial? It’s what all the great fashion houses have survived and thrived on.

Nowhere was Erté’s imagination more evident than in the theatre. While fashion brought him early fame, it was the stage that allowed him to indulge his theatrical impulses. Over his long career, Erté designed more than 100 stage productions across Europe and the United States. His sets and costumes for the Folies Bergère and the Opéra Garnier turned every performance into a procession of elegance. Dancers floated in gowns with wing-like trains, or strutted in flared trousers of gilt lamé. His work graced ballets and operas, but he had a special fondness for the revue and variety stage, where narrative mattered less than spectacle. And as long as the costumes were opulent, they didn't have to amount to very much at all.

In the 1920s, Erté moved to Hollywood at the request of Louis B. Mayer, designing costumes for MGM studios. His time in California was brief and sometimes frustrating, as his high-concept visions clashed with the practical logistics of film-making. But his costume work for stars such as Lillian Gish, Joan Crawford, and Marion Davies introduced American audiences to a European style that seemed at once timeless and fantastical. Several of his costume designs survive in studio archives, showing intricate beading, elaborate headpieces, and stage illusions that challenged the limits of fabric and frame.

Even in Hollywood, though, Erté remained something of an enigma. He ended up preferring to send sketches from Paris rather than attend the studios in person and adapt to their frenetic working pace. Gossip columns suggested his fastidious habits and preference for solitude made him “difficult,” though his work ethic was unmatched. He would sometimes produce a hundred drawings for a single production, each more ornate than the last. 

But as fashions changed and war loomed, the world shifted away from elaborate ornamentation. The 1940s and ’50s brought modernism, minimalism, and a retreat from the highly decorative. Erté was pushed to the margins. But he kept working, producing designs for theatre and jewellery, even as commissions thinned.

Then, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, a new generation rediscovered Art Deco. What had once been dismissed as gaudy was now reappraised as glamorous. The clean lines, the geometric patterns, the bold ornamentation all found new life in the hands of collectors and designers tired of minimalism. Erté, considered a relic of a vanished age, found himself in fashion again.

It began with galleries in New York and Paris organising retrospectives of his work. Then came reprints of his fashion illustrations, sold as art prints and featured in fashion magazines hungry for a touch of vintage flair. By 1974, Erté was producing limited-edition lithographs and serigraphs based on his earlier themes.

But he didn’t stop at reproducing the past. He began inventing again. In his seventies and eighties, he designed new, fabulously imaginative series, works unlike anything seen before. And these are the images that many modern-day collectors know him for.

The Alphabet Series, launched in the mid-1970s, reimagined each letter as a costumed figure or symbolic tableau. For example, the letter "A" became two stylized women in symmetrical robes, their sleeves forming the crossbar, the “G” was an elegant, elongated mermaid, while the “L” was a drop-dead glamourous, impossibly thin woman literally dripping in jewels, dressed head-to-toe in leopard skin (and having a major wardrobe malfunction), with her pet leopard laying at her feet. The figures in some letters were a little racy – heck, some were a whole lot racy. But it was a masterclass in graphic elegance, merging typographic form with haute couture drama.

The Numerals Series followed: 0 to 9 presented as anthropomorphic characters, rich with texture and metaphor. The “3” was one of his favourite motifs - mermaids, curled and with their tails touching. The “8” was a romantic image of a man and women holding the world between them and entwined into a figure representing “eternity”, with the sun, and the moon and the stars. 

Then came the Precious Stones series, where each gemstone was reimagined into a feminine form. They weren’t simply models wearing jewellery, but embodiments of each stone’s mythology. For example, “Diamond” was a spectral queen in silver gauze. “Sapphire” saw us back to the mermaid motif. These pieces blurred the lines between fashion, symbolism, and performance art.

Perhaps most whimsical were his Playing Cards series. Here, the King of Hearts was no mere monarch but a warrior-poet in embroidered robes. His Queen was a glorious red-headed nude, reclined on a swirling, heart-shaped motif. The suit of Diamonds glittered with architectural embellishments, and the Jacks were youthful adventurers dressed for a Venetian masquerade.

These late works brought Erté considerable commercial success. Galleries couldn’t keep up with demand, and collectors, especially in America, Britain, and Australia, snapped up portfolios. In Australian cities like Sydney and Melbourne, Erté’s prints appeared not only in galleries, but in stylised interiors where Deco architecture had been rediscovered and celebrated.

Indeed, the 1970s saw not just a revival of Art Deco art, but a wholesale reinterpretation of interior space. While Erté didn’t directly create interiors, design trends in that decade were characterized by bold patterns, luxurious materials, and eclectic styles, all of which echoed his sense of symmetry, metallic palettes, and dramatic contrast. 

And yet, for all the flamboyance of his art, Erté remained a private figure. He lived with Prince Nicolas Ouroussoff, a fellow Russian émigré, until the latter’s death in 1933. Afterward, he immersed himself in work, filling his studio with sketches, fabrics, feathers, and jewels. He never married, and although gossip swirled around him, it was never regarding his possible homosexuality, but was instead whispers of affairs, secret patronages, and the general jealousies of the Paris fashion world. Erté ignored it all and rarely commented on his personal or professional life. “The line is everything,” is all he would say when asked about his influences.

When he died in 1990, just shy of his 98th birthday, Erté left behind a vast archive: more than 20,000 drawings, hundreds of costume designs, and scores of sculptures and jewellery prototypes. His studio in Paris had become a shrine to 20th-century ornament, a reminder that while fashion may be fleeting, fantasy endures.

Today, his works continue to circulate among collectors of fashion, illustration, and antiques. His original prints command very strong prices at auction. Reproductions of his Alphabet and Numerals series remain popular wall art, especially among those who appreciate typographic design with flair.

In the end, Erté succeeded not by keeping pace with the trends of his time, but by creating a timeless world of his own. He saw fashion not as utility, but as theatre. Letters and numbers weren't abstract symbols, but costumed players in an endless ballet. And while other artists stripped down the world to its barest forms, Erté added plumes, jewels, ruffles, and veils, with each line a flourish, each curve a celebration. Erté never sought to capture life as it was. He gave us life as it might be, if only we dressed for it.

If you’d like to see more of (and perhaps own) Erté’s ground-breaking Alphabet and Numerals series, go to my website at: www.frenchandvintage.biz/pictures-repro-erte. All images are available in A3 size, and you receive a significant discount in postage when you order more than one.