1920S Black Silk & Lamé Chiffon Evening Wrap Kimono With Crystals

1920'S Black Silk Crepe Edwardian Cape With Couture Hand-Embroidery

1920S Black Silk Velvet Cape Lined In Champagne Silver Lamé

In the 1930s when French fashion couturier Jeanne Lanvin (1867-1946) was creating decorative bias-cut silk tulle overlays for her feminine full-skirted sleeveless "robes de style", she designed this black semi-transparent silk-tulle formal jacket featuring diagonally-striped topstitched silk-crepe appliques throughout the bias-cut panels. This sheer geometric-patterned cape-like jacket has a skirt that drapes from an open waistline and a top-fastening bodice with gathered rounded 3/4-length sleeves that each have two arm seams and shirred embroidered cuffs. It could have been the first "swing coat" design that was given that name around 1935, when Lanvin was the "uncontested leader in the haute-couture field"--according to the French Palais Galliera that has collected and exhibited similar garments at its fashion museum in Paris. In New York, TheMet collected a House of Lanvin black evening coat with a similar shape that also features dramatic linear appliques, but in a white starburst that it dates to Spring/Summer 1927. The unprecedented modern look of this Art-Deco women's jacket, which was inspired by 18th-Century French and Spanish topcoats for aristocratic court dresses, may have been good cause for Maison Lanvin to custom-make some close reproductions of a one-of-a-kind couture original for additional clients in Paris, which is implied by the remaining French brand-label noting "Adaptation Jean Lanvin...

Fortuny translated the caftan as a loose fitting outer garment, usually made out of silk velvet crepe or gauze the fitted back and open front allowed for elaborate stenciled decoration and venetian bead trim .Mariano Fortuny created his stenciled silk...