Materializing Empire in an Eighteenth-Century Lace Gown

Abstract

This article unpacks the historical meanings of an important lace dress, one made for Empress Maria Theresa of Austria (1717–1780) and represented in two prominent paintings by her court portraitist Martin van Meytens. After examining the dress’s history and the circumstances of its production and reception, the article turns to the question of lace’s materiality, which it approaches through concepts derived from recent scholarship in material culture studies. This approach defines the dress less as a dazzling garment and more as a material product, as a thing with specific physical characteristics that interact with a range of conceptual ones. By examining how this dress was made and the implications of that making on its representation, the article seeks to enrich our interpretive results beyond what recent theories of fashion or identity alone would permit. Reaching those results requires thinking extensively about the making of lace, and indeed how lace’s materiality—its ontological status within the materiality of eighteenth-century society—can be theorized to generate meanings from it. The article then traces the lace’s post-garment history, locating at least three fragments that either repurpose parts of it or mimic the appearance of the original.

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