From 1909 until his death in 1929 the Ballets Russes created sensation after sensation. Diaghilev and his brilliant collaborators took ballet out of its 19th-century corset and made it sexy with productions like Scheherazade, with its daring and exotic designs by Leon Bakst, or daring, thrilling, and sometimes controversial and even scandalous.

Diaghilev came from a highly cultured Russian family and had started early working in the theatre and founding a magazine, but the great dance impresario’s first love was actually opera!

“Although Diaghilev had attempted to improve the quality of ballet in the imperial theatres and supported his friends’ interest in dance,” says Jane Pritchard, the V&A’s dance curator.

“As a young man he would never have foreseen that after 1909 ballet was to become the central feature of his life.

“He only turned to dance when he realised that it was probably the most convenient medium for bringing together in performance the arts he loved, notably music and painting.”

Whatever the motive, Diaghilev had found his destiny. He had a genius for bringing together and inspiring dancers, composers, designers and artists, and for 20 years he dazzled the world with his brilliant productions.

He used the talents of the biggest names in the arts at a time when some of them were hardly known — Stravinsky, Picasso, Derain, Braque.

As Jane Pritchard says, “Diaghilev was responsible for the creation of ballets in which the elements of dance music and design fused together, establishing the standards to which subsequent companies throughout the world would aspire.”

This sumptuous exhibition assembles a stunning collection from the company’s history. You enter the dim lighting of the first of three large rooms, to find costumes from legendary works glittering in their glass cases.

The workmanship and luxury of their production could not be afforded today. There are set designs, photos, posters, and a sculpture of Vaslav Nijinsky by Rodin.

Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring caused a riot at its first performance.

The dancers could hardly hear Stravinsky’s music and had trouble following its complex rythms anyway, and the audience hated it and also the choreography.

There were boos and catcalls.

The original costumes are on show, together with a film of a fastidious recreation of this lost work by the Joffrey Ballet.

Incidentally, the whole of this scandalous premiere is brilliantly recreated at the start of the movie Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky.

Other outstanding exhibits are a presentation of Natalia Goncharova’s designs for The Firebird, including the actual backcloth, a fabulous city-scape of slender Oriental towers.

There’s also a stage-sized Picasso — his enormous front cloth for Le Train Bleu; two bare-breasted, rather chubby women, dancing across a rocky landscape.

In 1924 when it was seen in London, a review in Tatler described it as “strange, representing two fat ladies — breasts well to the fore, and not exactly where one would expect to find them!”

Coco Chanel’s bathing-costume designs for this work are also on show — it’s set on the French Riviera.

Among the 300 exhibits is also a short film of the legendary dancer Tamara Karsavina in an early role, a torch dance by Michel Fokine — the first of Diaghilev’s great choreographers.

Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes continues until January 9.