This evening dress, known as a robe de style, is distinguished by its tubular bodice with a dropped waist and wide, mid-calf length skirt. It is a silhouette for which the French couturier Jeanne Lanvin was well known during the 1910s and 1920s. Although Lanvin began her career as a milliner, she achieved great success with her imaginative women’s eveningwear, for which she drew inspiration from a wide array of artistic and cultural sources. Indeed, her personal library, whose contents served as her muse, housed rare volumes as well as historic costumes and textiles from around the world, ranging from Venetian lace collars to Chinese and Japanese ceremonial robes. The shape of the robe de style evokes that of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish women’s court dress, particularly the fashions found on female subjects depicted by court painter Diego Velázquez (Johnson 2002, 1–2). Elaborate embroideries and appliqués are also manifest throughout Lanvin’s work; the large metallic and silk embroideries found on this dress’s skirt motifs are comparable to those found in Chinese rank badges, while the dress’s metallic edging is reminiscent of the hems found on Manchu robes (Koda 2015, 37). llc