Court gown

This court dress is a gown or overdress, open at the front with a full skirt below. Ornamented with ruching in the same fabric, giving a wrinkled effect to the sleeves and front of the dress, it represents the maximum expansion of the silhouette in the history of fashion. The eye is drawn to the waist, extremely narrow in relation to the basquiña skirt with its voluminous sides. The shape of the skirt recalls the dresses in Velázquez's 1656 painting Las Meninas. The horizontal volume, with its ample base, is offset by the verticality established by the train which falls from the shoulders to join the back of the gown.

This form is known as a Watteau from its frequent appearance in portraits by the painter Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). This artificial silhouette is achieved by the corset and the tontillo panniers. The corset tightly compresses the torso, pushes up the breasts and narrows the waist. The tontillo panniers sit around the waist, in a structure formed by ribs of whalebone or cane fastened with ribbons, on which the skirt rests. Under the tontillo, the shirt covers the body. The dress's accessories are heeled shoes, gloves, a fan and a large and complicated hairstyle.

Unlike silk brocade dresses with lace and embroidery, this court dress is in calico cotton fabric printed with sinuous floral and vegetable motifs in the Louis XV style: these prints imitated and largely replaced earlier forms of ornamentation at a fraction of the cost. The magnificence of the silhouette contrasts with the relatively inexpensive fabric. The first prints came from India and were decorated with flowers and other colourful motifs. From the early eighteenth century on they were manufactured in Europe. Numerous calico factories were established in Barcelona and in the outskirts of the city. Calico marks a significant technological breakthrough in being the first decorative fabric that could be manufactured in a serial process.