Dress (Robe à la française), 1740s, England; textile Dutch or German. Silk, linen, pigment.
This painted silk gown is The Costume Institute’s earliest example of the eighteenth- century fashion for exoticism and chinoiserie. The gown’s bold, somewhat fantastical floral pattern, with its use of dense areas of saturated color, is not, however, typical of the more commonly seen Chinese export silks, with their delicate and naturalistic designs.
