He was the eldest son of ballet and opera designer Mstislav Valerianovich Doboujinsky, who co-founded the Le Monde de l'art movement - mir iskusstva - with Alexandre Benois and Sergei Diaghilev.

[3] In 1939, Doboujinsky designed the costumes for Ondine, then worked with Christian Bérard, Leonor Fini, Lila de Nobili, and founded his own set workshop with Lydia.

By the 1960s, new materials allowed Doboujinsky to create heads that were substantial but light enough to be worn for long periods, give as wide an angle of vision as possible and try to ensure that the wearer did not overheat.

[7] His first work for the Rothschild family was a coming-of-age party at the Château de Ferrières near Paris for which he made a dozen big plastic chandeliers for the ballroom and an enormous candelabra for the roof.

Doboujinsky designed a fake cordovan-leather dado and borders to frame a series of 17th century panels depicting David's triumph over Goliath, across the four walls of one room.

For the dado at Hôtel Lambert he made a shallow mould, adding latex to it to make sheets of embossed “leather’ which he gilded and glazed using centuries-old methods.

[7][3] Doboujinsky used silk-screen and textile-printing methods on a variety of suitable materials – silk, velvet, terrycloth and burlap - to produce a “correspondence” of colour and motif to the original ancient rug, rather than a precise copy.

[7] Doboujinsky received international recognition for the masks he created for Alfredo Arias' 1977 production of Peines du Coeur d'une chatte anglaise, based on the story by Honoré de Balzac in Scenes from the Private and Public Life of Animals, illustrated by J. J.

[9][10] Walter Kerr, reviewing the Broadway show for the New York Times in March 1980, wrote : “There are whiskered tomcats in frock coats, beribboned dachsunds in tea-party finery.

[7][1] Actress Marilù Marini, who played the English cat 'Beauty' in Arias's Peines de Coeur d'une Chatte Anglaise said of him: “He was a great artist who remained like a child who goes to the theater for the first time and wants to know what is behind the scenes.

He said “I’ve never planned a décor for myself”, as a child “I lived among pictures and furnishings of immense worth that provided the groundwork for my visual education…..Now I’d rather devote my days to doing interiors for others.”[7] In 1983 he joined forces with Sabine Dutilh who, until then, had been his assistant.