“Wardrobe of Peter I”: the king-dandy – Vedomosti

A wax-soaked free coat the color of a steel St. Petersburg sky and a red hat with earflaps – these exhibits on the mannequin that greets us at the exhibition “Wardrobe of Peter I” in the Hermitage’s “Costume Gallery” are about the same age as St. Petersburg itself. Before us is a textbook image of a man who “in spite of an arrogant neighbor” founded in 1703 the new capital of the Russian Empire on the frozen and swampy northern land, where it is almost always damp and a chilly wind blows, and the number of sunny days can be counted on the fingers.

The classic image of the reformer tsar was presented to us by the actor Nikolai Simonov in Vladimir Petrov’s film “Peter the Great” in 1937 and the artist Nikolai Ge in the film “Peter I Interrogates Tsarevich Alexei in Peterhof”: a stern look, grenadier height, Viking physique and modest, if not ascetic outfit. From the very first steps, the exhibition returns the viewer from the artistic reality to the documentary: next to the redingote on a mannequin is Peter’s lifetime growth measure. The debunking of the mythologized image of the tsar-reformer begins with anthropometric characteristics. Data of 1724: height 204 cm, chest girth about 100 cm, leg length 65 cm. We are in the territory of the modern size range 48–50. In other words, Peter the Great was tall, but not huge. And yet – he had a sense of beauty and a sense of proportion, as well as the habits of a true hedonist and the wardrobe of a real dandy.