In May 1848 merchant’s wife Anne Sykes rustled on to the dancefloor in a dress made of pink and purple silk taffeta. Her husband, Adam, was quite possibly in the cream velvet pile waistcoat that he had got for his birthday. Or perhaps he had opted for the bright silk tartan one. Either way, the young couple must have shimmered as they waltzed, giving the lie to the idea that the early Victorians mostly preferred to look as if they were off to a funeral.
Found on a market stall in the 1970s, an album that Sykes kept throughout much of her early adult life contains 2,000 swatches of fabric, all neatly snipped and mounted. Rather than collect her friends’ and family’s autographs, she asked instead for a sample of their clothes, which she then carefully transferred on to paper and annotated, much as you might do with seashells or foreign stamps. The result is an extraordinarily rich record of middle-class Victorian life, both at home and abroad (the Sykeses spent seven years in Singapore, which is where the pink and purple silk taffeta made its dazzling debut).
