Evening dress, late 1920s
Jessie Franklin Turner
Silk
Technical Glossary
Jessie Franklin Turner
Silk
Gift of Aline Bernstein, 1948 (C.I.48.3.3)
The nonchalant "hang" of this design is derived from the pretailored forms of regional dress as much as the planar silhouettes endorsed in the 1920s. Jessie Franklin Turner, a custom dressmaker especially famed for her sinuously draped tea gowns, created evening dresses with exotic allusions, often in fabrics of her own design. Although the simple chemise shaping of the gown suggests an earlier date, the designer has introduced a velvet border that extends into a train to reflect the vogue for increasingly long hemlines at the end of the 1920s.
