In 1944, the designer Oliver Messel was released from his war duties in camouflage to work on the film Caesar and Cleopatra, adapted from George Bernard Shaw's play. It was the only colour film on which he ever worked. A master of pastiche period style, Messel brought all his imagination and ingenuity to creating Roman and Egyptian costumes and settings in the context of the mid 1940s.

Wartime shortages of materials was no problem for Messel, who knew that in theatre and on film, an accurate depiction of reality was not required. He had always been creative in his use of materials, and to make this armband needed no 'real' gold metal or chased decoration. The base is possibly a light metal edged with strong yet flexible millinery wire, the whole overlaid with brown paper adhesive tape and then painted to simulate gold. Onto this was fixed the decoration of a grotesque faun face, made of moulded leather antiqued to simulate gold metal.

A number of these armbands survive, each with a different attachment, and, given wartime personnel shortages, Messel may have made some of the extant examples himself; they may be prototypes to be followed by other makers. He rarely designed anything without knowing how he wanted it made to give the full impact on stage or film.

Oliver Messel (1904-1978) was Britain’s leading theatre designer from the early 1930s to the mid 1950s, working in every aspect of entertainment - ballet, drama, film, musical, opera and revue - as well as in interior decoration and textile design. His lavish, painterly and romantic designs informed by period styles, were perfectly in tune with his times and earned him an international reputation. By 1960, however, Messel’s style had become unfashionable, having no sympathy with the new 'kitchen sink' school of theatre. He increasingly concentrated on his non-theatrical painting and designing and eventually retired to the Carribean, where he began a new career designing and building highly idiosyncratic luxury villas.