Isabelle de Borchgrave, a Belgian artist and designer who made ravishing life-size paper recreations of period garments celebrating hundreds of years of sartorial history, from glittering Elizabethan court gowns to the beaded flapper fashions of Coco Chanel, died on Oct. 17 at her home in Brussels. She was 78.

The cause was cancer, said her son, Nicolas de Borchgrave.

Ms. de Borchgrave was already a well-known interior and textiles designer when she became captivated by period fashions in the painting collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art during her many trips to New York City in the 1980s and early ’90s. There, she pored over the Renaissance portraits, as well as the florid costumes in the paintings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Jean-Antoine Watteau. Back home, she decided to try her hand at creating a period piece for herself — but out of paper, a material she had worked with before, making clothing for children.

One of her first efforts was inspired by a Bronzino portrait of Eleanor of Toledo at the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence, Italy. Painstakingly, she tried to recreate the gold-and-black brocade gown that Eleanor wore, although “it was very badly done because I had no technique,” she told the British newspaper The Telegraph in 2008.

“But every day I would learn something new,” she said, “and the technique arrived little by little.”

Ms. de Borchgrave had become friends with Rita Brown, a Canadian costume designer whom she had met on her trips to New York, and they decided to collaborate on a collection of paper garments, with examples from 300 years of fashion history, starting with the 15th century.