Two dress fabrics of brocaded silk with silk and metal threads, Spitalfields, 1750-1760

Silk dress fabrics with a yellow cannellé ground and brocaded with coloured silks and silver thread with sprays of flowers. These include rosebuds in shades of pink and crimson and exotic blooms in blues, mauves and silver thread. The design is echoed in the ground of the fabric. The textile has a dropped, reversed repeat, taking up the entire loom width of 52 cm. The largest flower in each group is repeated twice in shades of blue and white and then twice in shades of mauve and white. Tabby with cannellé ground (floating for 5 shoots of the weft) brocaded with coloured silks, unbound, and metal thread, bound in twill. Silver filé thread, paired shoots and silver strip. Silver strip and silver thread (loosely S bound strip on a white silk core) used together. The metal threads are bound in 4/1 twill by a proportion of the cannellé warp threads. In some parts of the textile the brocaded silk threads have puckered the ground fabric, presumably because they were inserted too tightly by the weaver or because the selvages were under too great a tension in the loom. Originally skirt panels from a dress.

Given by Miss D. M. Gower

The donor, Miss Gower, also gave a panel of thee silk to the Museum of London, acc. no. 87.162.

Highly-skilled weavers made this silk dress fabric in Spitalfields, London, in the 1750s. Spitalfields was the heart of the English silk industry in the 18th century. Wealthy men and women bought rich, patterned fabrics (sometimes decorated with costly metal threads) for their waistcoats, dresses and furnishings, as well as unpatterned silk taffetas and silk satins. Families with modest disposable incomes could afford smaller items, such as ribbons and handkerchiefs.

Silk fashions changed rapidly. The naturalistic rosebuds and exotic blooms of this design, which are arranged asymmetrically on a yellow ground, would be replaced in the 1760s and '70s by a fashion for stripes in many different forms crossed by stylised bunches of flowers.

T.161A-1959