Daily and general garments and textiles

Daily and general garments and textiles

Kasut manek are slippers with beaded toe coverings, worn by Peranakan Chinese women, together with a batik sarong and a kebaya. The Peranakan Chinese are descendants of early overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, including Malaysia, where they adopted various aspects of the indigenous cultures.

A kebaya is a traditional Malayan woman's garment in the form of a long-sleeved, hip-length blouse. It is worn with a sarong. Kebayas are often decorated with some form of embroidery, such as cutwork, needlepoint lace or stitched embroidery (both hand and machine forms). The blouse is often fastened down the front with brooches, known as peniti or kerosang/kerongsang, instead of buttons.

The Textile Research Centre in Leiden, the Netherlands, houses a woman's dress from among the Khattaks, a Pashtun tribe living southeast of Peshawar, west of the Indus river. (TRC 2018.2738). The dress is made from various pieces of black and dark-grey material.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London houses a woman's kimono from Japan that dates to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. It derives from the Aomori Prefecture in the northern part of Honshu Island. The kimono measures 129 x 100 cm. It is made of indigo-dyed plain-weave ramie, with stitched cotton decoration in the kogin style.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London holds a knitted and embroidered shawl that was reportedly exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851. It was made of nettle fibre and measures 170 x 120 cm.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London houses a woman's shirt from Lahore, in what is now Pakistan. It is dated to the mid-nineteenth century. The shirt, locally called a kurta, is made of cotton with silk and metal thread embroidery, and sequins. It is 71 cm long and 156 cm across the sleeves.

The Textile Research Centre (TRC) in Leiden keeps a traditional felt coat from southern Afghanistan (TRC 2010.0087). This type of garment is called a kusai and is illustrated in Mountstuart Elphinsone's Account of the Kindom of Caubul.., which was first published in 1815. This type of coat is still worn by Pashtun nomads (Kuchis) in the region.

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam houses a remarkable lace collar. It dates to about the second quarter of the seventeenth century. It was sewn in The Netherlands, but the lace itself was probably made in Italy. The collar consists of a linen main piece offset with a large panel of lace. The lace attached to the linen main piece is worked in reticella with square shaped motifs. The scalloped edge is worked in punto in aria.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London houses a lap cloth (localled called pangkheb) from Bhutan. It is made of unbleached cotton with woven and embroidered geometrical patterns in terracotta and indigo-coloured cotton threads. It is almost 2.5 m long. It dates to about 1900.

The Layton jacket is an example of an early seventeenth century English woman’s jacket (sometimes described as a waistcoat, using the seventeenth century meaning of the word, namely a coat that came to the waist). It is an example of the type of garment worn on formal occasions by English women at the end of the sixteenth and in the early seventeenth centuries.

This example of quilting is used for a ‘suit of armour’ for a horseman. The quilt is made from two layers of natural cotton material, with a wadding layer in between of raw cotton. The decoration consists of bands of red and dark blue cotton cloth sewn (applied) onto the cotton ground. The stitching of the quilting takes the form of horizontal rows of small running stitches worked in a thick, cotton sewing thread.

The collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York includes a man's coat, a choga, which probably dates to the first half of the nineteenth century and may derive from Kashmir in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent. It is 133 cm long and 75 cm wide at the bottom. It is made of wool and is decorated with metal thread embroidery and applied braids.

The Cleveland Museum of Art, USA, holds a prime example of an Uzbek man's coat made of a cotton ground material and embroidered in cross-stitch with silk thread. It measures 150 x 218 cm. The design of the embroidery was first drawn onto the coat, after which the coat was taken apart and the separate segments embroidered, after which the coat was sewn together again. The coat is lined with ikat cloth.

The collection of the Textile Research Centre (TRC), Leiden, includes an embroidered man's gown from the Kano region, Nigeria, acquired in 1989. The gown measures 110 x 110 cm. It is made of hand woven cotton and decorated with hand embroidery.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art houses a man's robe from Uzbekistan. It measures 134 cm (centre back length) and dates to the late nineteenth century. It is made of cotton with metal thread embroidery and a velvet trim. The lining is also made of silk, with resist dyed warps (ikat).

The Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin houses a man's shirt from Peru. It dates to the second half of the nineteenth century, or earlier, and was acquired by the German textile merchant and collector, Christian Theodor Wilhelm Gretzer (1847-1936). The fabric is made of cotton. The tunic measures 90 x 72 cm. The embroidery is worked with silk, using cross stitch.

The Greek fashion designer, Mary Katrantzou (b. 1983), is based in London and has produced a number of embroidered garments. During the 2014 fashion season, for example, she designed two embroidered sweatshirts called the “Jumbar G Fur” and the “Topaz Tik Tok". The two sweatshirts are stitched by the embroidery house of Hand & Lock (London).

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York houses a piece of embroidery from Switzerland, which has been dated to the fourteenth century. The embroidery is worked in silk on a linen ground. It measures 61.8 x 70.6 cm. 

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London houses a waistcoat measuring 76.2 x 38.1 cm. It was made in the mid-eighteenth century in India, perhaps for the European market, and consists of a cotton ground material with woollen thread embroidery.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London houses a beautifully embroidered coat that dates back to the early seventeenth century and originates from Mughal India (acc. no. IS 18-1947).

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