The dress is simple in its fabrication, exquisite in its execution. In ghostly white cotton muslin with a subtly fluted line, its bodice is made up on lace panels that give way, below a dropped waistline, to tiers of gentle pleats.

“I love this dress,” says Danielle Whitfield, curator of fashion and textiles at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria. “It looks so simple, but it is nothing less than a celebration of youthful elegance and the liberated female body.”