19 garments across eras and cultures
These Sonia Rykiel pieces capture the designer's genius for making luxury feel effortless—the cream balloon pants with their exaggerated proportions and gathered ankles, paired with the black velour top's relaxed drape, turn athletic codes into something almost sculptural.
These two qipaos capture the precise moment when Shanghai tailoring met 1950s Western glamour in Hong Kong's fashion houses. The teal dress deploys embroidered florals as strategic punctuation—collar, cuffs, hem—while keeping the body clean, but the orange number commits fully to pattern, letting geometric motifs create the dress's entire visual rhythm.
The safari jacket's crisp military bearing—those sharp breast pockets, the belted waist, the no-nonsense button stance—gets a complete personality transplant forty years later in that slouchy olive coat. Where the '70s piece stands at attention with its structured shoulders and precise tailoring, the contemporary version goes AWOL, letting the same utilitarian details hang loose and oversized like borrowed army surplus.
These two dresses reveal Ann Lowe's extraordinary range across four decades of couture, from the cream silk taffeta's cascading tiers of ruffles that anticipate Jacqueline Kennedy's wedding gown to the charcoal chiffon's knife-sharp pleats punctuated by her signature silk roses.
These two gowns reveal how the Second Empire's taste for theatrical luxury filtered through different social strata across two decades. The earlier brocade ball gown, with its off-shoulder bertha collar and metallic weave catching light like armor, speaks the formal language of Empress Eugénie's court—all glittering surfaces and architectural volume over crinolines.
These two pieces capture Kaffe Fassett at different points in his obsession with Fair Isle geometry—the poncho reveling in the full riot of traditional Shetland patterning with its cascading zigzags and rainbow fringe, while the waistcoat distills that same DNA into something more restrained, almost architectural.
