"The House of Worth" revisited-in a great new exhibition

... the Maison Worth, which, for over fifty years, dressed almost every fashionable woman in Europe and America, including the Empress Eugénie of France and Queen Victoria of England. (Queen Victoria's dresses had to have a British label sewn in, and each one, no matter how elaborate, was worn only once.) The resplendent career of the house and its founder, a young English linen-draper named Charles Frederick Worth, will be celebrated by an exhibition opening at the Brooklyn Museum on May 8, called "The House of Worth." ... Founded in 1858, and flourishing until about 1910, the Worth establishment on the Rue de la Paix was the first great maison de couture; before it, there had been only linen-drapers, who sold yard goods and laces, and "little dressmakers" who made them up. By 1868, the house employed 1,200 people and was capable of turning ,out as many as 1,000 dresses a week; for one of its magnificent ball dresses, the price was about $1,500. Above are two of Worth's own watercolour sketches for ball dresses of the 1860's, each skirt sustained by a complex, delicately-balanced wire-and- tape device called a "Thompson cage"....