This dress is a handmade halter neck style dress with a calf length A-line skirt. The garment was donated to the V&A by collector Ann Putterill along with two other items. In the 1980’s Putterill became interested and amassed a collection of over 400 affordable, pop and photo print garments. She purchased this dress at a jumble sale in Fulham, London in 1987.

The dress is made with a synthetic satin screen printed textile titled ‘Raspberry Lips’ which was designed as a furnishing fabric by Jane Wealleans (later Wentworth) (b. 1946) for OK Textiles Ltd. Wealleans, a graduate of the Royal College of Art began her career producing a line of textiles for the shop Mr Freedom and went on to establish OK textiles with Susan Saunders in the early 1970s, using the snappy slogan ‘if it runs we chase it’. Part of a group of RCA graduates who were designing textiles and clothing for a young fashionable crowd, they produced both furnishing and dress fabrics in small runs. Later on Wealleans branched out into fashion design.

The ‘Raspberry Lips’ print is an example of the bold and playful designs which defined the pop aesthetic the era. New technical advances in printing processes in the 1960’s such as screen printing on synthetic fabrics, transformed the way textile designers worked.

This dress is a rare example of a handmade garment that is contemporaneous with the historic textile used and currently represented in the V&A collection.