Dress fabric

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.