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Selling Silks

A Merchant's Sample Book 1764

Lesley Ellis Miller

$69.99

Hardback

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English
Victoria & Albert Pubs
01 May 2014
In 1764, British Customs confiscated a book containing hundreds of silk samples of different qualities from French agents who were attempting to sell them illegally in London. The merchant's sample book acquired in 1972 by the V&A may be this very book, a fascinating record of the eighteenth-century French and English silk industries and their commercial practices. Alongside a full and faithful reproduction of the whole album, Lesley Miller sets in context the role of the book as a marketing tool from the premier European silk-weaving centre of Lyon and as a model for Spitalfields manufacturers. This publication makes accessible the contents of an extremely rare and fragile object. Translations of French inscriptions, identification of how samples have migrated from one page to another, and technical analysis of some of the silks, as well as a glossary and biographical data on the Lyonnais suppliers make this an invaluable resource for historians, collectors and designers.
By:  
Imprint:   Victoria & Albert Pubs
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 305mm,  Width: 254mm,  Spine: 25mm
Weight:   1.724kg
ISBN:   9781851777815
ISBN 10:   1851777814
Pages:   272
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Lesley Ellis Miller is Senior Curator of Textiles and Fashion at the V&A. She is a specialist in the silk industry of eighteenth-century Lyon. She is author of a monograph on the fashion designer Cristobal Balenciaga (V&A 2007) and is currently working on the refurbishment of the V&A's galleries of European seventeenth- and eighteenth-century decorative arts.

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