Seventeenth-Century Women's Dress Patterns: Book One

This innovative and breathtakingly detailed book from the V&A's fashion collections presents dress patterns, construction details, embroidery and making instructions for fifteen garments and accessories from a seventeenth-century woman's wardrobe. Book One in this exciting new series includes waistcoats and bodices, a mantle, gloves and a hat. Full step-by-step drawings of the construction sequence are given for each garment to enable the reader to accurately reconstruct them. There are scale patterns of each garment and scale diagrams for making linen and metal thread laces, silk braids and embroidery designs. Multiple photographs of the objects, close-up construction details and the groundbreaking use of x-ray photography reveal the hidden elements of the clothes, the precise number of layers and the stitches used inside. This new series will be essential reading for art historians, stage designers, museum curators, teachers of fashion and costume.