A stunning, rare 17th-century dress, once worn by a wealthy West Country British woman to the royal court, has survived for over 360 years in pristine condition thanks to the historians and curators that have preserved it.
The Silver Tissue Dress, once belonging to Lady Theophilia Harris of Bath in England, is comprised of a whalebone bodice and skirt handmade from fine silk woven with real silver thread, the “silver tissue” from which the dress gets its name.
Dating from around 1660, the dress is a rare artifact that testifies to the culture of women’s fashion that preceded the elaborate dresses we see on the red carpet today.
“It is one of the earliest surviving, if not the earliest surviving dress in an English collection. It is one of the real treasures of the collection of Fashion Museum Bath, who have kindly lent it to us,” Historic Royal Palaces curator, Polly Putnam, told The Epoch Times.
“Like on the red carpet today, your dress was used to express status, wealth, and your political alliances. Like the red carpet, some of the most spectacular items of clothing ever made were worn to court.”
The Silver Tissue Dress would have been worn to the Georgian Royal Court during the reign of King Charles II as a status symbol and is the earliest example of its kind, according to Putnam. As was the custom of the time, Lady Theophilia, the wife of the Member of Parliament Sir Arthur Harris, First Baronet of Thayne, would have also worn her hair “shoulder length and tightly curled with a center parting.” The most fashionable jewelry of the era was pearls.
Charles II was responsible for introducing many of the customs and rituals of the royal court after his return from exile in Europe. Any court attendee with respectable social standing was freely invited to attend “morning levee,” meaning they could watch the king get dressed, and the absence of formal invitations to attend court persisted from 1714 for over 100 years.
It is incredible that the Silver Tissue Dress has remained intact since this era.
Using delicate entomological pins, Britton has lovingly restored the silk of the dress by rehydrating the fibers with a fine water mist, known as ultrasonic humidification, and leaving it to stretch and settle around a foam mold to help recreate the puffed sleeves and full bodice of the past. “It’s a real privilege to work on this dress,” she said.
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Besides her now world-famous dress, much information about Lady Theophilia’s life has been lost to history. “We don’t know much about her,” Putnam told The Epoch Times. “She was born Theophilia Turner. We don’t know the date of her birth, but she died childless in 1702, outliving her husband by nearly 50 years.”
Both the Turner and Harris families were allegedly friendly with the famous diarist, Samuel Pepys, and Lady Theophilia made her first appearance in Pepys’s diary on Jan. 1, 1660, as a child, when the diarist joined the Turner family for supper.
The spectacular Silver Tissue Dress was handed down through generations of Lady Theophilia’s family and became part of the Fashion Museum Bath Collection in 1964, on loan from the Vaughan Family Trust. Owing to its rarity, the dress was exhibited almost immediately and single-handedly shines a spotlight on the lesser-known history of the Georgian Royal Court.
