PatternVault

In Paris, a major exhibit devoted to the House of Worth is entering its final weeks. Hosted by the city’s Musée des Beaux-Arts in collaboration with the Palais Galliera, the show offers visitors a rare glimpse of 19th-century designs by Charles Frederick Worth, the pioneer of haute couture, as well as later pieces from the storied maison.

If you can’t make it to Paris, there’s an exhibition catalogue (in French only). The cover close-up is of a Worth tea gown worn by the Countess Greffulhe — best remembered as the model for Proust’s Duchess of Guermantes.

By the time Worth couture patterns were becoming widely available, the chief designer for the house was Jean-Charles Worth, one of the founder’s grandsons. The Paris show includes some 1920s pieces by Jean-Charles, such as the “Charleston” evening dress seen above. According to the museum’s press materials,

The designer’s affinity for Art Deco is manifest, particularly in his use of motifs that elevated the models to the status of objets d’art. The high-profile couturier, who appeared on the cover of TIME on 13 August 1928, had close ties to the artistic world, collaborating with Jean Dunand and using textiles designed by Raoul Dufy.

The Worth evening dress pattern featured in my goddess-dressing post was promoted in the McCall Quarterly for Summer, 1927, on a page devoted to “Paris Gaieties Translated into Chiffon and Satin.” It’s a short evening dress with side drapery finished by embellished appliqués at the left hip and shoulder blade.

Thanks to the Worth design sketches at the Victoria and Albert Museum, we can identify this evening dress as “Hermione,” from Jean-Charles Worth’s Winter 1926-27 collection.

The 1926 Worth drawing appears to show rosette embellishment for the appliqués — an option that the pattern’s instructions also suggest. And although McCall’s also suggested one of their beading transfer patterns, perhaps the rosette option was the most achievable for home dressmakers who lacked experience with haute couture embellishment.

This is something I can speak to from experience: I started to make the Hermione dress, and got stuck at the stage where I needed to make embellishment decisions.

Worth, Inventer la haute couture / Worth: Inventing Haute Couture is at the Petit Palais to September 7th, 2025.

For more on the exhibit, see Leslie Camhi, “The Extravagant Eye of Charles Frederick Worth” (The New Yorker online, July 25, 2025), and Amy Verner, “Inside the New Exhibition, ‘Worth, Inventing Haute Couture,’ at the Petit Palais in Paris” (Vogue.com, May 7, 2025).