Original watercolour signed with Sonia Delaunay’s initials, “S.D.” One leaf under a wooden frame with a mat, a few minor chips and small lacks to the frame. Red stamp on the verso of the leaf: "Ce projet de tissu provient de l'Atelier que dirigeait Sonia Delaunay entre 1925 et 1933. Son fils, Charles Delaunay".

Exceptional sketch of a colourful chevron dress, one of the famous "tissus simultanés" created by Sonia Delaunay. Likely to be a preparatory drawing for a dress featured in Delaunay’s portfolio Ses Peintures, Ses Objets, Ses Tissus Simultanés, Ses Modes, published on the occasion of the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs.

In 1924, Delaunay founded her Atelier Simultané in Paris with her clothing, accessories, textiles, and interior objects created after her radical approach to abstraction and simultaneous contrast of colours. Her venture expanded significantly following her successful costume designs for Tzara’s theatre and the ballets of Massine and Diaghilev. At the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Delaunay achieved widespread acclaim with her iconic Boutique Simultanée, located on the Pont Alexandre III and shared with couturier Jacques Heim. This period marked her emergence as a symbol of modernity across Europe. Her creations, defying the traditional hierarchy of the arts, were worn by French film stars and the wives of Bauhaus professors. In homage to her success in applied arts—considered by Jacques Damase as "tableaux vivants"—she published in 1925, through the Librairie des Arts Décoratifs, a portfolio of 20 stencil-coloured plates featuring her fashion designs, motifs, and objets simultanés, along with glowing reviews and poems by André Lhote, Tzara, Soupault, Cendrars, and Delteil. This watercolour, beyond its strong stylistic resemblance to a dess on the second plate of the portfolio, is fully aligned with "the early years of the Atelier marked by a predominance of geometric forms such as the square, diamond, rectangle, and chevron" (Musée de Liège). That same year, she posed for a photographic portrait in her Boulevard Malesherbes studio, working on a large chevron pattern similar to this exceptional sketch.

A rare artwork at the crossroads of fashion and the avant-garde by Delaunay "who responded to the social call of her time, seeking, for the adornment of both the body and the home, the sensual song of colour" (Agnès Callu).