Adrian's Modern Museum
After retiring from the glitter and frenzy of designing costumes for Hollywood's top leading ladies, Gilbert Adrian opened a fashion house that would cater to America's best-dressed (if somewhat less renowned) style mavens. His designs of the 1940s and 1950s bore all the hallmarks of his most spectacular film costumes. His clothes were intricately constructed, colorful, witty, decorative, complicated to wear, often audacious, and always chic. In his "Modern Museum" collection of 1945, Adrian paid homage to both Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque with bold juxtapositions of abstract shapes and brash colors. This fusion of contemporary fine art with fashion became a signature of Adrian's designs from the mid and late 1940s.
Adrian created the two dresses below for his wife, actress Janet Gaynor.
Click photographs for details.