Worse for wear

Erté was destined for the imperial navy. Failing that, the army. His father and uncle had been navy men. There were painters and sculptors on his mother’s side, but they were thought very frivolous. Romain de Tirtoff (‘Erté’ came from the French pronunciation of his initials) was born in 1892 at the St Petersburg Naval School where his father Pyotr was inspector. When he was a little boy, his aunt bought him a set of wooden soldiers. Instinctively, he hated war, violence and, above all, uniforms. He burst into tears and threw the box out of the window.

What he liked best was to play with his mother’s old perfume bottles, which he dressed in scraps of lace to make ballerinas. That is what Erté did for the rest of his long and productive life until his death in 1990, aged 97. He created wonderful, wild, impossible costumes for fantasy figures.