Schiaparelli’s February 1946 showing for summer featured many amusing dress prints, including a design called Les Vieux Beaux (The Old Beauties), used for a ballet-length rayon dinner dress with a wide, wavy, off-the-shoulder collar. The fabric print, by the master silk designer Sache, features fin-de-siècle boulevardiers twirling canes and wearing derbies, top hats, or straw boaters. Sache provided designs to all the great haute-couture houses, from Balenciaga to Worth, and was responsible for translating Dalí’s design for a lobster onto silk organza for Schiaparelli in 1937 (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1969-232-52). Dilys E. Blum, from Shocking! The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli (2003), p. 263.