The Sleeping Beauty, designed for the Sadler's Wells (now Royal) Ballet in 1946, is Messel's most enduring production. The fairy costumes and fantasy elements are set in a 'real' world, inspired by the soaring architectural fantasies of the 17th and 18th centuries and costumes based upon mid-late 17th-century fashions, mixing English, Spanish and French period styles.

The Lilac Fairy is chief godmother to Princess Aurora; when the Fairy Carabosse, angry at not being invited to the Christening, declares that Aurora will prick her finger with a spindle and die, it is the Lilac Fairy who bestows her gift - that she will sleep for one hundred years and be awoken by a kiss. The purple and white shapes on the costume indicate lilac.

Although people think of a tutu as being a set shape, it is as subject to the vagaries of fashion as the length of a skirt or hairstyle. In 1946, the fashion was for full skirts and heavy decoration, reflected in the bell-shape of the tutu and the amount of trims. When the costumes were revised in the late 1950s, fashions were changing and the pared down look of the 1960s was beginning; the tutu, reflecting fashion, became flatter, like a plate, and the decoration sparser.

Oliver Messel (1904-1978) was Britain’s leading theatre designer throughout the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, mastering every aspect of entertainment - ballet, drama, film, musical, opera and revue - as well as working in interior decoration and textile design. His lavish, painterly and romantic concepts were perfectly in tune with the times and earned him an international reputation. By 1960, however, that style was becoming unfashionable, and Messel gradually abandoned theatre and built a new career designing luxury homes in the Caribbean.