In his popular play, The Admirable Crichton (1902), J.M. Barrie looked at the British class system through the medium of comic fantasy. An Earl, his family, friends and servants are shipwrecked on a desert island. The Earl is a man of liberal social views; his butler, Crichton, a firm believer in the status quo. But as the most practical of the castaways Crichton finds himself in charge and by Act III, set two years after the shipwreck, he has assumed authority.

When the play was revived at the Royalty Theatre in 1920 the women's Act III costumes were designed by Claude Shepperson (1867-1921), an artist and book illustrator who was better known for his black and white line drawings than as a costume designer. Shepperson created some amusing outfits, which showed the Earl's daughters acclimatised to their surroundings and transformed into Amazonian hunters, but ones with smart 1920s hairstyles. The card, on which this design is mounted, is heavily annotated with notes about the costume and explains that Lady Mary is wearing a 'three quarter loose tunic of golden yellow soft antelope or doe skin with no ornament save a border of jade green & sapphire feathers' and 'short antelope breeches'.