The France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies has awarded the 2026 Josephine Baker Undergraduate Honors Thesis Prize to Sita Antel ’26 for her Art History honors thesis, “Silks From Behind the Iron Curtain: The Glory of Russian Costume and Yves Saint Laurent.”
A double major in Art History and Comparative Literature, Antel held a Hume Honors Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center during the 2025–26 academic year. Her prize-winning thesis examines how Yves Saint Laurent’s revolutionary 1976 collection, inspired by Russian peasant costumes, helped shape the global cultural landscape and paved the way for The Glory of Russian Costume, a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Antel’s research explores the unexpected role of fashion and museums in easing Cold War cultural divisions. She demonstrates how Saint Laurent’s reinterpretation of Soviet cultural heritage allowed Western consumers and museum-goers to engage with Russian culture on a more intimate level, fostering cross-cultural understanding at a time when formal political avenues were often strained. Her thesis offers a compelling look at how French fashion transformed foreign folklore into a global luxury experience—with implications that extended beyond the world of fashion to diplomacy and international relations.
Antel will continue her studies at Stanford in fall 2026, when she begins an MA in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.