#silk ribbon
STAYS & BUSK 17th Century
Info from the V&A Museum:
Front lacing stays and busk of pink watered silk, lined with linen and fully boned. All the outside edges of the stays are bound with pink silk grosgrain ribbon. The sleeves are made separately and laced into the armholes with pink silk ribbons and points of tinned iron. There is a band of back-stitched embroidery at the neckline and armholes and a line of couched thread at the waist. The separate busk is boned vertically and horizontally, at the top, and completely bound with pink silk grosgrain ribbon.
[Stays] These front lacing pink silk stays have a high back cutting across the top of the shoulders, with a decolletage and a long pointed waist in front. Below the waist there are 11 boned tabs with silk gussets between them. The stays consist of three shaped pieces on each front, two side back pieces and two centre back pieces. The shoulder straps, each with an eyelet, extend from the back and attach with a ribbon through an eyelet on the front. The sleeves are wide and cut straight, extending to below the elbow. They attach to the corset with three ribbons each through thread eyelets. Four ribbons decorate the centre back tab. The stays are backed with linen and stitched with pink silk thread to make compartments of 4 to 5 mm width for the whalebone. Above the boning at the front, the fabric is reinforced with decorative stitching. The seams are reinforced with cross stitch and covered on the right side with pink silk grosgrain ribbon. The upper and lower edges of the stays are edged with pink silk grosgrain ribbon, as is the armhole. At the lower edge, there is a pink and green silk grosgrain ribbon underneath the pink one. The sleeves are lined with pink silk taffeta. The thread eyelets are made with buttonhole stitch. The ribbons are made of pink silk taffeta and retain their original tinned iron points.
[Busk] The pink silk busk is in the form of a curved ’T’, edged with pink ribbon. It is made of pink watered silk backed with linen and stitched with pink silk thread into 40 compartments for the whalebone, running vertically. The centre bone is 8mm wide with two of 7mm either side, alternating with strips of 4 mm wide. The lengthwise boning ends 3.5 cm from the top edge, which area is filled with 7 horizontal compartments of whaleboning. The busk is edged with pink silk grosgrain ribbon.
Given by Miss C. E. Gallini
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Silk Ribbon Bolero: Summer Fancy in 1948
This “Sunback Dress” and bolero from Modern Knitting reflect the popular look of the late 1940s. Post-war American women embraced the New Look offered by Christian Dior in 1947 with fitted bodices and long, full skirts. The skirt on this dress is both gathered and pleated at the waist for fullness and then was knitted until it was 30 inches in length. This sundress also reflects the new prosperity and leisure that marked much of America in the era. Both garments were knitted of ¼ inch rayon or silk ribbon. Pretty fancy for a summertime dress, but pretty amazing to wear too, I would think. It would be cool to the touch and have the subtle glow which both kinds of ribbons can have. But it came at a cost.
They estimated that the price would be $50 in rayon ribbon which works out to over $580 today, or $60 in silk ribbon which is $799. This was unusually high for this magazine as the next page has a simple dress from a boucle wool fingering yarn which costs only $14.50 to make. The ribbon was wider and the knitting would have gone faster, so there was a time savings. But you can imagine that anyone embarking on this project would have had to think long and hard about how much wear they would get out of it to justify the cost.
Ribbon yarns are far more common now and made out of all kinds of fibers, but I suspect the silk ribbon version would remain the most luxurious and perhaps the most beautiful choice.
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