Dinner dress

Mon. Vignon

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Uncannily like the dresses in the wonderfully presumptuous portraits of John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eakins of the same time, this 1870s evening dress extracts the full glitz and glamour of eighteenth-century fashion for a new epoch. Ornament crowds out other ornament; the configuration of the open robe is renewed; its silhouette is bold and begins to connect the eighteenth century with its Belle Époque revival.

The Costume Institute

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Costume Institute's collection of more than thirty-three thousand objects represents seven centuries of fashionable dress and accessories for men, women, and children, from the fifteenth century to the present.

Metropolitan Museum of Art