Unknown Maker, French

This restrained silk dress hovers between Empire and Romantic styles. The high waist, defined just under the wearer’s bust, is a signature of Empire-era dress, popular between 1790 and 1815. The dress’s heavier-weight silk twill, its open bateau neckline, and its corded silk-satin trim at the cuffs and hem all move toward the Renaissance Revival look of Romantic-era dress popular in the 1830s.

At the hem, motifs of abstracted cyprus trees and palmette designs evoke the patterning found in imported textiles-in particular the Kashmiri wool shawls Napoleon’s soldiers accessed through new trade streams and brought back to France.