"Junon" dress, fall/winter 1949–50 by Christian Dior.

Pale-blue silk net embroidered with iridescent blue, green, and rust sequins

By 1949, Christian Dior's instinct for calibrated innovations of the body's "line" had established him as fashion's preeminent arbiter. That year, dresses called "Venus" and "Junon," or Hera to the Greeks, were among the most coveted of his designs. Dior's Venus was realized in the delicate eighteenth-century gray that was his signature, frosted with iridescent beading and embroidery. But his Junon is more vividly conceived. The magnificent skirt of ombréed petals, like abstractions of peacock feathers without their "eyes," obliquely references the bird associated with the Queen of the Olympians.