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Silk shirt, 17th century
Unknown1600/1650
Nordiska Museet
Stockholm, Sweden
Details
- Title: Silk shirt, 17th century
- Creator: Unknown
- Date Created: 1600/1650
- Subject: Shirt
- Provenance: Sweden (SE), Katrineholm, Ökna
- Physical Dimensions: w63
- More Information: Nordiska museet’s collections feature a knitted shirt from the 17th century. The material consists of silk and silver-gilt threads. The shirt was knitted in five parts, and the seams are hand-sewn with silk thread. There are theories that these early silk shirts were knitted on a frame and that they were used as undershirts by both men and women. There are about thirty patterned knitted silk shirts from the 1600s preserved in various museums around the world. They are all similar, but none of them are exactly alike in pattern. The common feature is that they all have a floral pattern similar to the patterns that can be found on fabrics and embroidery from the time. Preserved customs lists from 1685 show that 436 knitted silk shirts were imported into Sweden and that this kind was the height of fashion in the seventeenth century. The shirt was donated to the friends of Nordiska museet in 1940 by Countess Maud Crönhielm-Törnros.
- Materials and Techniques: Yellow silk stock stitching with pattern in purl stitches in the shape of curved tulips with contours of white yarn; the purl stitches in the pattern are in silk wrapped in gold thread. The bottom edge is knitted in basket weave in white yarn. Also white on armband, around the neck and on the top of the sleeve. The shirt is knitted in five parts, knitted at the back and front, but not around. The white yarn forms long floats on the reverse. The white yarn may possibly have been light blue initially, as is the case with the shirt now in the Victoria & Albert Museum, which is very similar to this one, see V & A id. 807-1904. The shirt has been stitched together at the front, but was originally completely open and had some form of closure, probably like the English shirt, with tight ball buttons in thread work. At the bottom there are fragments of a red wax seal. Foreign manufacture.
- Type: Unknown
- Rights: Photo: Mats Landin, © Nordiska museet
- External Link: http://www.digitaltmuseum.se/things/trja/S-NM/NM.0221941
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