Dress

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The most salient feature of eighteenth-century appropriation demonstrated in this dress is its long line of embroidery at center front and descending to the hem. The floral decoration and its placement on the garment arise not from copying eighteenth-century women's fashion but from a comprehension of eighteenth-century menswear. It is as if the waistcoat's ebullient decorative impulse has been transferred to the brown wool of this almost too-dour nineteenth-century dress.

The Costume Institute

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Costume Institute's collection of more than thirty-three thousand objects represents seven centuries of fashionable dress and accessories for men, women, and children, from the fifteenth century to the present.

Metropolitan Museum of Art