Woman's evening coat

Japonisme was prevalent at the House of Worth from the 1880s, when its founder, Charles Frederick Worth (1825–1895), began incorporating motifs evocative of Japanese aesthetics into the Lyon-manufactured fabrics for his Victorian evening gowns. Jean-Charles Worth, Charles’s great-grandson and chief designer at the House of Worth after the First World War, created this coral silk velvet evening coat with cream silk satin collar and cuffs. This elegant coat, with cascading folds that fall in a loose and asymmetric fashion, is pulled together in a kimono-like manner at the front and back with the help of velvet corded rosettes. It would have been worn by fashionable women during high-society gatherings, such as evenings at the opera. Its nearly seamless cut shows the brand’s transition into an era of simpler designs, in which kimono-inspired silhouettes gave freedom to the bodies of European and American women that had previously been constrained by bodices and corsets.