Waistcoat

In the nineteenth century waistcoats tended to be one of the more elaborate and colourful pieces of the male wardrobe, which is partly why they survive in relatively large numbers. They might also have been kept for their decorative quality or for sentimental reasons when they went out of fashion.

This gentleman's waistcoat is sprinkled with a dainty design of roses and branching stems on an oyster coloured silk ground. The pattern calls to mind eighteenth century Spitalfields silks, but is woven using a jacquard loom invented at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Joseph Marie Charles Jacquard (1752-1834). Although ideally suited to large elaborate patterns, it was also used for the delicate designs that were fashionable during the 1840s and 1850s. The colours and floral motifs scattered over this waistcoat are very similar to those found on dresses of the period.