Evening ensemble

As Mrs. Kempner told the Independent for January 16, 1994, "In the seventies, I was a Moroccan, a Chinese woman, Carmen. I traveled the world through my Saint Laurent clothes. And I was a Russian peasant from the Ballets Russes. . . . I remember . . . Tommy [Mr. Kempner] would pick me up, and he'd say: 'Now who are we today?'"

Saint Laurent's evening gown from his "Russian Collection" is a relatively rare style for Mrs. Kempner. With this full-skirted gown she veered from the columnar silhouette that she found so flattering to her attenuated frame. Saint Laurent's "Russian Collection" was, like Dior's "New Look," a dramatically anachronistic evocation of the past. It's opulent romanticism, however, recharged the enervated world of haute couture. As was often the case with Saint Laurent, this seminal collection anticipated the historicizing extravagance of the 1980s by almost a decade.