In the 1940s and 1950s, Frederick Gibson Bayh—an in-house designer at the San Francisco department store Gump’s—attracted the attention of the national fashion press for his creation of new garments composed of antique European and Asian textiles, including Indian saris and Japanese obis. For this skirt, Bayh used the entire lower half of a Qing dynasty (1644–1911) Chinese dragon robe.  These bureaucratic and imperial garments featured stylized symbols such as water, mountains, and dragons to indicate social status. By using the robe as raw material for a garment marketed to buyers in the United States, Bayh contributed to the wider mid-twentieth-century trend of cultural appropriation and commodification in European and American fashion.