Costume Design 

Curator: This elegant drawing, called "Costume Design," is by the artist Erté. The medium looks like a pen and ink drawing. I'm immediately struck by the sheer decadence and whimsy! That lilac hue is mesmerizing. Editor: I see power, actually. Look how the costume merges traditional Eastern motifs with modern architecture. The dragon on one side balances with the skyscrapers on the other. I mean, what kind of power is suggested by linking these visual vocabularies? Curator: Right, there’s such a symbolic charge to those choices. The dragon and pagoda are age-old emblems of protection and spiritual power, echoing the tradition of ornate Eastern aesthetics. Note how that is rendered in painstaking detail. Editor: While that skyscraper motif pulses with the energy of modernity and industrial progress! Think about the social shifts roaring through the 1920s and 30s, when Erté created this. Women were demanding agency, new technologies were reshaping societies and power was shifting on the international landscape. She is at once anchored and rising! Curator: Her stylized presentation also echoes back to Ancient Egyptian iconography – the elongation of her form and highly stylized features create this otherworldly timelessness. I see hints of Nefertiti here. Editor: Precisely! Erté actively uses a range of signifiers of cultural memory. It’s a collage of signifiers which presents power. Let’s think about flapper fashion here. The illustration feels linked to that rebellious era and challenges established norms on race, class, gender. Who would wear this costume? Who *could* wear it? Curator: I appreciate how Erté layers symbols—the ancient with the futuristic—and ties it all together into an enchanting surface with elegant precision. Editor: Exactly, and teasing out all those layers allows us to examine the image not merely as a decorative sketch but as a response to its own changing world.