Over her 50-year career, that began at age 41, Karinska earned legendary status time and again through her continuing collaborations with stage designers including Christian Bérard, André Derain, Irene Sharaff, Raoul Pêne du Bois and Cecil Beaton; performer-producers Louis Jouvet and Sonja Henie; ballet producers René Blum, Colonel de Basil and Serge Denham.

Barbara Karinska was born Varvara Andriivna Jmudska (Ukrainian: Варвара Андріївна Жмудськa) in 1886, in the city of Kharkiv, Russian Empire (now in Ukraine).

Following the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, Varvara, Irina and Vladimir spent the years of the Civil War moving between Kharkiv and Crimea.

[citation needed] Lenin's New Economic Policy (1921–1928) provided for limited capitalism to help finance his new regime exhausted and debilitated by three years of civil war.

Karinska opened a Tea Salon that became the meeting place of Moscow artists, intellectuals and government officials every afternoon at five o’clock.

[4] Karinska's reasons for leaving RSFSR are multiple: (1) the death of Lenin in 1924 and the uncertainty of what was to come; (2) within weeks after Lenin's death the new regime nationalized her embroidery school and turned it into a factory to manufacture Soviet flags[5] (in exchange, she was awarded the title of “Inspector of Fine Arts”); (3), importantly Mamontov, a chronic alcoholic was incapable of performing any kind of work and thus seen as a symbol of bourgeois decadence; his arrest was imminent.

Supported by Anatoly Lunacharsky, Minister of Education and long time friend of her father, she proposed to take a large number of embroideries made by her students to exhibit in Western European cities as a “good will” gesture to demonstrate the great cultural advances that the young Soviet regime was making.

[citation needed] With corruption widely practiced throughout the Soviet government, an exit visa was obtained for Mamontov who left immediately for Germany where he had cousins in exile.

Vladimir boarded the train with a suitcase filled with his Soviet school books, American hundred dollar bills, bought on the black market, hidden between the pages.

[citation needed] Reuniting with Vladimir Mamontov in Berlin, the family of four headed for Brussels where Karinska's father and several brothers and sisters were living.

The family was forced to move to a popular quarter of the city of lights and Karinska looked desperately for any and every kind of work using her skills of sewing and embroidery.

It wasn't long before she made her first costume; an elaborately embroidered robe designed by Boris Bilinsky for the 1927 motion picture The Loves of Casanova.

[8] The costumes were designed by Christian Bérard, André Derain, and Joan Miró, and the choreography was by George Balanchine and Leonide Massine, both choreographers with whom she had worked previously.

But war was in the making and early in 1939, Karinska abandoned her London empire, on short notice, and moved permanently to the United States, leaving her nephew to close the business with honor; evacuate Reynolds's House and liquidate his aunt's accumulation of costume sketches and antiques.

Wounded, captured and escaping from a German POW camp in August 1940, made his way to the South of France where he received the Croix de Guerre for Bravery.

Vladimir received instructions to make his way to the Spanish border where he would be provided safe transit to a ship leaving Lisbon for New York, via Havana.

Shortly after Vlady's arrival they began executing the designs of Karinska's arch rival Irene Sharaff for Gypsy Rose Lee.

Miss Lee believed that Karinska understood the impact of her performance and enhanced her ability to deliver her unique style of burlesque to the audience.

Since the German occupation of Paris, Karinska had lost contact with her daughter, Irène, who was living in Sarthe at the family residence of her husband, Xavier François.

It was Vladimir the soldier who found Irène days before the liberation of Paris and from his nearby barracks wrote to Karinska special delivery informing her that she was a grandmother twice over.

The affordable rent of the dusty atelier permitted Karinska to purchase a townhouse on E. 63rd St. (where the Baron's parquet floor was installed); a house in Joan of Arc's home town, Domrémy-la-Pucelle, in the Lorraine region of Eastern France, and a George Washington period house that she named "Saint Joan Hill" in Sandisfield, Massachusetts.

During the war years, while Karinska took extensive leaves to supervise costume production for motion pictures in Hollywood, she would rent her 56th St. mansion and her staff to ballet and theater companies, ventures that always ended in misunderstandings.

The label “KARINSKA Stage and Art Inc.” was sewn into costumes for ice shows, musicals, legitimate theater, motion pictures, lyric opera and the most important for the 'Lady from Kharkiv' – Ballet.

Costumes designed by Raoul Dufy, Georges Braque, Leonor Fini, and Yves St Laurent (for Roland Petit) are the work of Irène Karinska.

This period that lasted thirteen years produced a long list of ballet productions in different musical genres, including some abstract designs —such as “Jewels” 1967— is often praised by critics as Karinska's greatest and condemned by others for “garish” colors.

Both aging during the 1970s Balanchine and Karinska returned to a fantasy ballet they had begun in the early 1950s —"Birds of America," based on the drawings of John J. Audubon.

Karinska would make endless sketches by pasting pieces of fine fabric onto pencil-drawn figures on heavy watercolor paper.

(Eyewitnesses remarked on the immense effort and skills required to make the complex costumes with the 'extra bounce', in the 1970s, for example resulting in the Cincinnati Ballet gaining knowledge of her 'secret' methods.