Dress c. 1938

Francis Law Durand made this watercolour painting, Dress, sometime during his lifetime. It’s like a fashion plate, but there's something so odd and lovely about it. The simple vertical stripes of the dress are so exact, and the darker blue lines feel almost like a map. The whole thing has a beautiful handmade quality, you can see the paper’s texture coming through the paint. Look closely and you can see the individual strokes, how the colour pools in places, how the application of the paint changes the tone of the blue, making it darker or lighter. There’s this sense of the artist building up the image, stroke by stroke. There's something very Agnes Martin about this, or maybe it’s the other way round! It really shows how fashion, like art, can construct different ways of seeing and thinking about the world. It’s more than just a dress; it’s an idea.