Sometime around 1910, Nelle Fabyan, wife of Col. George Fabyan of Geneva, said yes to the dress.

It was a rose-pink floor-length gown of silk, satin and tulle, embellished with metallic thread embroidery, burnished gold lace and handmade rosettes along the neckline.

It has a slender bodice and a short train that would have accentuated Nelle’s petite 4-foot-10 frame, designed by French fashion icon Georges Doeuillet – pronounced doo-yay – the same who credited with later designing the first cocktail dress.

Preservation Partners of the Fox Valley will host an exclusive, first-look reception at the entire dress – not just the teaser parts in publicity photos – from 4 to 6 p.m. Saturday, April 18 at the Fabyan Villa Museum, 1925 S. Batavia Ave. in Geneva.

Tickets are $125 and include the unveiling of the dress, celebratory toast and commemorative gift. Tickets are available online at ppfv.org or by calling 630-377-6424.

“We don’t know how she acquired it, if it was made for her or she bought it in a store,” Preservation Partners of the Fox Valley spokesman Al Watts said. “It’s possible he did make it for her. They were wealthy enough, and Col. Fabyan had connections in France. We don’t think she traveled to Paris to get it designed. We know Doeuillet sold his gowns in stores in New York.”

As one of Doeuillet’s wealthy clients, Nelle Fabyan bought one of his Parisian couture gowns likely around 1910.

Before her death in 1939, she gave the gown to Ethyl-Marie Williams, the wife of one of the Fabyans’ chauffeurs, Bert Williams.

The Williams family donated it to the Fabyan Villa Museum in 1987 and The Conservation Center restored it in 2025.

All proceeds of the reception will benefit the historic preservation efforts of Preservation Partners of the Fox Valley, a nonprofit that operates small historic sites for the Forest Preserve District of Kane County and serves as a resource for historic preservation efforts.

Preservation Partners owns the Fabyan collection and operates the Fabyan Villa Museum, according to a news release.

The gown will go on permanent display at the Fabyan Villa Museum when it opens to the public for the season on May 2.

The gown will be the only one designed by Doeuillet on display in the world.

The restoration and its protective case cost $27,735, Preservation Partners spokesman Al Watts wrote in an email.

Watts said the group received grants from the Kane County Office of Community Reinvestment, the Grand Victoria Riverboat Casino, Community Foundation of the Fox River, Colonial Dames of America and Friends of Fabyan, “as well as several thousand dollars from private donors.”

The restoration began in early 2023 and the gown was completed in Fall 2025, Watts wrote.

Only five other museums in the world have a garment designed by Doeuillet in their collection: the Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Kyoto Costume Institute in Japan, the Alingsås Museum in Sweden and the Cincinnati Art Museum. The Fabyan Villa Museum will be the only museum in the world with a design by Doeuillet on public display.

“All the photos of his outfits in other museums are all dark colors,” Watts said. “We don’t know if [the dress is] unique ... but nothing anywhere is close to this brightness of color.”

Fabyan’s dress has a Doeuillet’s tag inside, as it has appeared in other dresses he designed, Watts said.

“Although we have no proof of this, we believe this dress was designed before he designed the cocktail dress – only nobody called it the cocktail dress until many years later,” Watts said.

Doeuillet, who lived from 1865 to 1934, opened his maison – fashion house – in 1899 in Place Vendôme, one of the wealthiest commercial districts of Paris, and quickly became the most influential couturiers of his time, “thanks to [his] impeccable and highly refined taste,” according to Paris’s cultural encyclopedia, La Ville Lumiere.

“Elaborate confections are Doeuillet’s specialty,” reported New York’s Everybody’s Magazine in 1905. “[His] prices are monumental, and his clientèle is made up from what one of his rivals has called ‘the swell mob,’ meaning the rich and extravagant as distinguished from the exclusive and chic.”

Until his death, Doeuillet was featured in numerous popular fashion magazines of the era, including Vogue, Notions and Fancy Goods, Theatre Magazine, and Gazette du Bon Ton, according to the news release.

In 1911, France recognized Doeuillet for his contribution to fashion by naming him an officer of the Legion of Honor – similar to the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the U.S.