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Lecture: Portrait of a Woman in Silk—Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World

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One of the most popular silk designers in the 18th-century British Empire was Anna Maria Garthwaite (1688-1763), a clergyman’s daughter turned designer. Garthwaite’s designs blended English flora with exotic imported botanicals, including plants from Africa, North America, and the Caribbean, and embodied important intersections between fashion and science. Her popular designs both mirrored the larger cultural fascination with things botanical and helped foster a craze for wearing botanical landscapes in silk around the British Empire. Join author Zara Anishanslin as she considers how women on both sides of the Atlantic used flowered silk to fashion the botanical landscape of empire.

Textile Society members are invited to attend a tea reception following the lecture in Nichols Trustees Suite.


For more information on becoming a Textile Society member, please contact Elyse Strand, coordinator of affiliate programs and events, at (312) 443-9198 or textilesociety@artic.edu.

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