Costume worn by Loie Fuller

In 1892 Loie Fuller premiered dances in which she manipulated fabric in swirling, undulating patterns, helping to define the modernist aesthetic that inspired artists from sculptor Auguste Rodin to poet W.B. Yeats to the mother of modern dance, Isadora Duncan. A key figure in stagecraft as well as in modern dance, Fuller established patents for colored lighting gels, phosphorescent fabric, and chemical salts. This dress, like most of her costumes, retains white expanses that could continuously transform under colored lighting. She likely wore it in a 1925 dance set to Claude Debussy’s La Mer (The Sea)—music inspired, in part, by Katsushika Hokusai’s famous print Under the Wave off Kanagawa. Fuller’s interpretation involved a staircase and yards of silk, making the entire stage move like ocean waves.