Gown
- Place of origin:
- Date:
1760-1769 (made)
1740-1749 (hand woven)
- Artist/Maker:
- Materials and Techniques:
Silk, lined with linen, hand woven and hand sewn
- Credit Line:
Given by Mrs H. H. Fraser
- Museum number:
- Gallery location:
- Download image
This 1760s gown features a rose-red silk with trails of ivory flowers woven in a complex technique. The fabric, a type of silk known as gros de tours, dates from the 1740s, but the gown itself has been remade into the style of the 1760s. It may have started out as a fashionable 1740s sack-back gown and would have featured the ‘wing’ cuff sleeve popular during that decade. In the 1760s, the garment was restyled into the popular English style of gown with pleated back. The cuffs were replaced with single ruffles with scalloped and pinked edges.
Due to the great expense of silk, it was very common practice in the 18th century for women to remake and update their gowns. Gros de tours silks were luxury fabrics in the 1740s, costing between 6 shillings and twelve shillings per yard; a sack-back gown required some fifteen yards of silk.
Physical description
Woman's gown of woven pink and ivory silk. Complex weave with a white ground warp and weft, and supplementary pink weft. The pattern is created with complex binding, making it reversible with a strongly contrasting pattern. This is particularly effective on the sleeve ruffles.
With a figured design of large and small floral sprays. The dress is open-fronted and has an English back. The bodice robings end at the waist and are finished on the diagonal. Four buttoned straps diminish towards the waist and fastens with self covered buttons close the bodice across the bosom. The sleeves have a shaped scalloped cuff at the elbow headed by a pleated frill with a pinked edge. The bodice is lined with white linen, and the right breast and tabs with glazed cream linen. A tape is stitched at the centre back waist. The skirt is unlined and there are no weights inside the sleeve. Hand woven and hand sewn.
The material is woven in pink and white silk, and the ground is covered with the pink silk pattern weft white the white floral pattern is made in a Gros de Tours with a flush effect.
Ground warp of white silk woven in tabby and used for the flush effect. Binding warp of white silk, binding the pink pattern weft in a chevron twill based in a repeat of 4 ends, and binding the white ground weft in tabby under the flush effect. Ground weft of white silk and pattern weft of pink silk.
Place of Origin
Great Britain, UK (made)
Date
1760-1769 (made)
1740-1749 (hand woven)
Artist/maker
Unknown (production)
Materials and Techniques
Silk, lined with linen, hand woven and hand sewn
Object history note
The lace cuffs were removed during conservation 2007 and numbered T.433A&B-1967.
Descriptive line
Woman's gown of woven silk, lined with linen, Great Britain, 1760-1769, fabric hand woven 1740-1749.
Bibliographic References (Citation, Note/Abstract, NAL no)
Hart, Avril and Susan North, Historical Fashion in Detail: The 17th and 18th Centuries, London: V&A Publications, 1998, p. 86
Exhibition History
Two Centuries of British Fashion. From the Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Kremlin State Museum, Moscow
5 Sept - 17 Nov 2008
Materials
Silk; Linen
Techniques
Hand sewing; Hand weaving
Categories
Textiles; Fashion; Women's clothes
Production Type
Unique
Collection code
T&F
