Design for the Costume for the Woman of the Future, 1953 by Salvador Dali

Throughout his life, Dali had a keen interest in design, especially of clothes but also of objects, stage sets, jewelry and inventions. In the early Thirties, during a period of extreme hardship, he made designs that Gala tried, unsuccessfully, to sell. Some of these were for inventions such as fingernails with mirrors on them but he also designed clothes, such as a dress with padding to attain the "ideal' female shape.

Dali made the design for the costume for The Woman of the Future in 1953. The by-now infamous Dalinian images of the crutch and the extended body parts are both used in the design, although their appearance in his paintings had greatly declined. The crutch, this time held by a servant of the statuesque woman, props up the woman's hugely extended hair. Dali once designed a jeweled nose crutch, which he described as "an absolutely useless kind of object to appeal to the snobbism of certain criminally elegant women." The use of the crutch in this design seems to have the same inference. The woman holds up a huge butterfly into which she is vainly seeking her own reflection.