In Fashion: Two Banyans and a Suit

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Notes

1. Early titles include McKendrick, The Birth of a Consumer Society; Roche, The People of Paris and The Culture of Appearances; Ribeiro, Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe.

2. We use the word “banyan,” rather than the generic “nightgown,” which is potentially confusing for twenty-first-century visitors. There is apparently no document that reveals whether eighteenth-century contemporaries differentiated between the two words in English. In French only one term existed, robe de chambre.

3. Kerry Taylor Auctions, held November 19, 2011. Purchase price: £29,760. Members of the vendor’s family worked for the English East India Company in the mid-nineteenth century and may have had a connection further back. Inherited from Martin Willoughby Parr, CBE (1892–1985), late of the Sudan Political Service and latterly Governor of Equatorial Province in South Sudan. His grandfather was General Thomas Chase Parr (1802–83), of HM Bombay Army. Museum number T.31–2012.

4. Christie's, Interiors – Style & Spirit Edition. Total purchase price: £38,337.50. Museum number T.77-2009.

5. Purchased at auction from Thierry de Maigret, at Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 12 June 2009, lot 23. Purchase price: £891.83. Museum number T.10-2010.

6. Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets, Chapter 6: Parisian Shops and the “Magasins Anglais.”

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Notes on contributors

Lesley Ellis Miller

Lesley Ellis Miller was Lead Curator for Europe 1600–1815 Galleries between 2010 and 2015, when she returned to the position of Senior Curator of Textiles and Fashion, which she has held since 2005. She is also Professor of Dress and Textile History at the University of Glasgow. She specializes in eighteenth-century textiles and dress and twentieth-century couture, her main publications being Selling Silks. A Merchant’s Sample Book of 1764 (2014) and Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion (2017).