Dress

James Galanos studied fashion design at the Ethel Traphagen School in New York City before launching his design career as an assistant to Hattie Carnegie, working as a sketch artist for the Hollywood film designer Jean Louis, and taking an apprenticeship with Robert Piguet in Paris. In 1951 he founded his own label "Galanos Originals." Although he worked as a ready-to-wear designer, Galanos quickly became recognized for the amount of precision and detail that went into his garments. This spectacular evening dress from his Fall 1967 collection is characteristic of this investment in technique and emblematic of the designer’s most creative impulses. The floor length gown has been embroidered with a blanket of coq feathers that have been dyed in brilliant shades of pink and green, and meticulously worked into an allover diamond or harlequin pattern. The luminosity of the feathers, in a jarring combination of pink and green, and the geometric forms of the decoration both share affinities with the contemporaneous Op Art movement of the late 1960s.