Evening dress
Not on view
One of the world's great connoisseurs and collectors of eighteenth-century art and decorative arts wore this dress. Givenchy is an unrelenting modernist; here he may have been touched by his experience of working with Schiaparelli in his offering of a truncated illusion of an open robe in the back using a fall of cloth, like a fly panel except that it is heavy to fly away or drape away. Rather, it functions as a reductive form of an eighteenth-century back, heavy in a continuous flow to the ground. The exotic and sumptuous fabric only confirms the intimation of the eighteenth century in spite of Givenchy's modernity.
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