Anna Karenina

Ever since the first time I read Anna Karenina many years ago, I decided it was my favourite book. Tolstoy’s beautiful, lyrical passages immediately drew me into another world of Russian aristocrats who spoke French – vastly different from the twentieth century middle-class Australia I grew up in (even if I share a Slavic heritage). I couldn’t turn the pages quick enough to find out what would happen to Anna and Vronsky, Kitty and Levin.

Before I knew there was a new film of the novel being made, I had decided one day I would pay a visual homage to Anna. The film has not yet opened in Australia, and I have not paid too much notice to the costuming, although that is one aspect of the film I am very much looking forward to.

I don’t own any nineteenth century clothes, but I do own a vintage Russian-style fur hat, so I’ve taken some poetic licence and cobbled together something to evoke a winter ensemble Anna might have worn.

The black velvet coat is a sumptuous 1950s swing coat, a shape that of course was not in fashion at the time; I’ve cinched it in at the waist with a wide belt. The fur collar is another vintage item picked up somewhere over the years, and the white velvet gloves are trimmed in rabbit fur on the cuffs. Those I purchased in a Melbourne boutique. I think I’d probably need some thermals under there too …

My Anna Karenina is standing before a church in a village called Kukoba, in the Yaroslavl Region, found here.