Heather Firbank was about 21 years old when she wore this dress. The design is romantic and demure, with a late-eighteenth-century inspired ‘Romney’ collar, with a slightly raised waistline that also reflects the newly revived ‘Empire-line’ silhouette promoted by Parisian designer Paul Poiret. Fine silk, lace and chiffon are used, as appropriate for a formal occasion, while the high neckline and short sleeves indicate an afternoon rather than an evening social event. The Firbank family invested heavily in Heather’s wardrobe, and many more of her clothes survive at the V&A, along with bills and letters, now in the V&A Archives. Her wardrobe helped to anchor the family’s status in London society and was vital to the honing of Heather's public image and meeting the expectation that she would secure a partnership with a suitable husband. In the event, Heather remained unmarried.

A woven silk label inside the dress shows that it was bought from Kate Reily of Dover Street in Mayfair. There were thousands of small dressmaking and tailoring businesses managed and staffed by women in London during the years before and after 1900. Although she is no longer well-known, Kate Reily was one of the most famous British fashion brands in the late 1800s and early 1900s, having built a reputation for custom-made dresses for European royalty, and wealthy American clients, while also selling good value ready-made accessories to more ordinary clients from her prestigious address, close to the Ritz Hotel on Piccadilly.

The woman behind the Kate Reily name was born Harriet Reily, the daughter of an estate agent in Bloomsbury. She opened her business in about 1878, in Mount Street, and married Major Arthur Griffiths soon afterwards. By the 1890s her business had moved to Dover Street, eventually occupying three adjacent six-storey houses, and expanding to branches in Chicago and New York. The American operation ran for just a few years, closing in 1894, but was a significant achievement, twenty years before British dressmaker Lucile would open a New York showroom. The French couturier Madeleine Vionnet is thought to have trained at the Kate Reily headquarters in London for a time in the 1890s. After Kate Reily/Harriet Griffiths died, in 1908, the shop was refurbished but her 36-year-old business ceased trading in 1914, at the beginning of the First World War.

Like many formal gowns from the late Victorian and Edwardian period, Heather Firbank’s Kate Reily dress is made of incredibly delicate materials and is too fragile to mount for display on a mannequin. Only a few other Kate Reily-labelled garments survive in public collections (in Britain and the US) and this dress is important evidence of a successful fashion business developed by an otherwise unknown Victorian woman entrepreneur.