I lucked into this lovely Helen Rose dress some years ago at a rural antique mall, not exactly what one might expect to find in such a place, but there it was.  I happily brought her home with me, and ever since I've been trying to place a bit of a date on the making of it.  Part of the problem is that Miss Rose's gowns are very hard to pin down, as she tended to recycle ideas, and frankly, near the end of her career she wasn't exactly fashion-forward.

Rose opened her salon in 1958, and the dress has an original nylon zipper, so I knew it had to be after 1960 or so.  But the hard thing is that she made dresses like this one until she retired in 1976.  I looked in her dishy little bio, Just Make Them Beautiful  to see if anything similar was pictured, but the closest I found was this gown from the movie Designing Woman.

I had pretty much given up when I revisited the antique mall this week, and hanging in the booth where I found the dress was this:

That's my dress, being worn by the original owner in 1962!  Case solved.