Ball Dress c. 1938

Edith Magnette created this drawing of a ball dress, we don’t know exactly when, using a combination of watercolor and graphite. Look at the way the dress seems to emerge from the paper, its pale blues and pinks so delicate they could almost disappear. I imagine Magnette, hunched over her work, carefully building up the layers of color to give depth to the fabric, to the lace trim. Think of all the dressmakers and seamstresses and how much craft went into making these things. The dress itself is frozen in time, a ghost of a bygone era, waiting for a wearer who will never arrive. It reminds me of some of Pierre Bonnard’s interior scenes in the way the dress is somehow animated; it has a life of its own.