Oliver Messel (1904-1978) was Britain's leading theatre designer of the 1930s, '40s and '50s. He created settings and costumes for all forms 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.

Romeo and Juliet was Messel's third film and his first for Hollywood. He designed the settings with the production's art director, Cedric Gibbons, and the costumes with MGM's principal costume designer, Adrian (Adrian Adolph Greenberg). Romeo and Juliet were played by Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer.

This photograph depicts the film crew in the foreground preparing to shoot the Capulet’s ball where Romeo first meets Juliet. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s film version of Romeo and Juliet was the most expensive production in the studio’s history up until 1936. More than 1200 costumes were created to dress not only the principle performers but the many extras who can be seen in the background of the photograph, 500 people worked on the costumes for two months and a total of 18,000 yards of cotton, silk, velvet and wool went into the gowns of the nobles and courtiers who appear in the film.