1948

Woman's Evening Dress

Credited by no less an authority than fellow couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga with raising dressmaking from an applied art to a pure art form, Charles James was the "enfant terrible" of fashion in the late 1940s and 1950s. Self-taught, he was a perfectionist who obsessed over the cut and construction of each garment, producing designs that were completely idiosyncratic. James's virtuoso ball gowns were engineered to be sublime sartorial sculptures and were usually fashioned of lustrous heavy silk satin that forgave no mistakes in either pattern or stitching. Nevertheless, the shaping was so calculated that James's garments often integrated features that were extraneous in less analytical clothing. The bow at the back of this gown is not applied; rather, it is cut in one with the skirt front and thus becomes integral with it.