Evening dress
Designer
Grès
(French)
1950-1951
Ivory and gray matte silk jersey
Gift of Solange Landau
Object number2005.88.1
This gown with deeply fluted pleats and a long, ornamental drape exemplifies the lavish use of extraneous fabric so typical of 1950s fashion. It also employs an interior corset, an element that became essential to the creation of Madame Grès's post-war Grecian gowns. Grès exclusively used corsets made by Alice Cadolle, a leading lingerie house in Paris. However, Cadolle corsets did not begin to appear in Grès gowns until several years after World War II - a major departure from her work of just a decade earlier, when interior linings, let alone corseting, were almost never used. The fact that Grès used corseting at all dispels the myth that her designs were unchanging.
DescriptionFloor length goddess evening dress in tightly pleated sheer ivory silk jersey asymmetrically draped and stitched down over fitted, boned long torso bodice, with contrast pale gray / blue panel draped as loop across bodice and right shoulder, caught at LF waist and extending to hemCollections
Exhibitions