2026 Josephine Baker Undergraduate Honors Thesis Prize

Sita Antel

Our 2026 Josephine Baker prize for an undergraduate Honors thesis goes to Sita Antel for her art history thesis “Silks From Behind the Iron Curtain: The Glory of Russian Costume and Yves Saint Laurent.”  A member of Stanford’s Class of 2026, Sita double majored in Art History and Comparative Literature. She held a Hume Honors Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center in 2025-2026. In fall 2026, she will embark on an MA in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Stanford. In her prize-winning thesis, Sita explores how Yves Saint Laurent's revolutionary 1976 collection, inspired by Russian peasant costumes, primed the global cultural landscape and helped pave the way for a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, titled The Glory of Russian Costume. As Sita shows, fashion contributed, in unexpected ways, to soothing Cold War divisions by allowing Western consumers and museum-goers to engage with Soviet cultural heritage on a more intimate level, fostering a spirit of détente and mutual comprehension when formal political avenues were fraught. Sita’s thesis reveals the ways in which French creativity recontextualized foreign folklore into a global luxury experience, with concrete implications for global diplomacy.