Across the Courts of Europe: A Clue to the Palmwood Dress
Fashion has always crossed social and geographical boundaries, passing from wealthy women to those of more modest means and from one social circle to the next. Across Europe, aristocratic women enthusiastically exchanged ideas. Styles also travelled through pattern books, drawings, paintings and fashionably dressed dolls.
A court dress?
It has long been my theory, and you may disagree, that the Palmwood silk dress was a court dress from the very early seventeenth century. I imagine its silk damask coming from Italy, perhaps Venice, and being made into a gown by a London tailor who may also have supplied garments for Queen Anna, the Danish wife of King James I.
When I study the Palmwood dress, I visualise a carnation-red silk gown with tiny silver buttons running down the fitted bodice and a standing collar of crisp white lace.
A gown in Dresden
I have searched paintings and museum collections for a comparable dress. Recently, I found one. What struck me was the similarity of its shape: the double sleeves, one closed and the other hanging, and the raised edging at the shoulders. This gown has a longer point at the front of the bodice, but otherwise the resemblance is so close that the Palmwood dress might almost have been cut from the same pattern.
The gown belonged to Magdalena Sibylla, Electress of Saxony (1586-1659), and is held by the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. It is described as a golden-yellow Italian silk satin dress from the 1610s, embellished with embroidery and silver and gold lace.
What the comparison can tell us
I am not suggesting that the Palmwood dress belonged to Magdalena Sibylla. What interests me is the similarity of the cut of the two gowns. If ideas and fashions circulated among the courts of Europe as I believe they did, their shared shape and construction could support an early seventeenth-century date for the Palmwood dress. The similarity cannot establish that date on its own. It is a comparison worth exploring.
