Costume and fancy dress balls were a feature of social life for many centuries, even surviving into the Depression years of the 1920s and 1930s. Guests vied with each other to devise or hire ever more splendid and eye-catching costumes.

One guest with a head start was designer Oliver Messel. He would often wear adaptations of his own stage designs or devise fantastic creations for himself and his friends. This particular costume was worn by him at a party given by Nicholas de Gunsberg in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris in the late 1920s. Although simple in outline, the costume is made spectacular by the design of clouds, scrolls and stars, painted onto the jacket while Messel was wearing it by the French poet Jean Cocteau, the enfant terrible of 1920s Paris. The characteristic stars became a Cocteau signature motif.

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 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.