Oliver Messel designed Shakespeare's The Tempest for the Old Vic company in 1940, setting the production in the early 17th . The costumes follow the broad outlines of the period, with doublets and breeches, ruffs and high hats, but are made using 20th century materials. Messel was always inventive in his use of fabrics and trimmings, using pipe cleaners (as braid or jewellery settings), crin (a stiff meshed fabric used here for ruffs), chandelier drops (backed with sweet papers they became precious stones). He also mixed fabrics - scene canvas with satin, velvet with wool - to give texture and variety under the lights.

Black costumes are particularly difficult to design as on stage they can create a dense 'black hole'. Messel has solved the problem in this costume by relieving the black velvet with a coarser canvas painted black, so that the light reflects off different surfaces, defining the actor's body and he breaks the line between doublet and breeches by adding a band of deepest crimson velvet around the lower edge. Down the front, of the doublet, catching the light, are rosettes made of a plastic ribbon, which pleats crisply and holds its shape.

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 Caribbean, where he began a new career designing and building highly idiosyncratic luxury villas.