Like many designers Oliver Messel's large library and artefacts relating to costume, both historical and national, was acquired mostly out of interest in dress and crafts, not because he was necessarily researching a for a particular production. This jacket is typical of the folk costumes of the Austrian Tyrol, with its dark basic colour and dark green collar and scalloped trimming.

It is possible that Messel wore the jacket for a fancy dress ball. Fancy dress and costume balls were a feature of social life in the 20th century, especially in the 1920s and 1930s and even into the 1950s; many families would also have played charades or even put on plays, keeping a dressing up box for this purpose, or even raiding the family attics for period dresses worn by their ancestors.

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.