Seasonal Fashions: Springtime in Charleston

Event Details

Spring comes early in the South Carolina Lowcountry, as do thoughts of gardens, garden parties and garden tours. The Charleston Museum celebrates the coming of the season with the first display in a year-long rotation in a portion of the Historic Textile Gallery. Seasonal Fashions: Springtime in Charleston, on exhibit February 19 - April 15, will include an array of white, embroidered and lacy fashions of the 1900s - 1920s, perfect for a lovely spring day. Huge hats and omnipresent parasols that completed the fashionable look will not be overlooked. Seasonal Fashions: Springtime in Charleston will be rounded out with examples of silk art embroidery, popular in the early 1900s, and beautiful silk batiks by Anna Heyward Taylor in the 1920s, reflecting the botanical themes enjoyed by artists and needleworkers of Charleston. For more information, please visit www.charlestonmuseum.org or call (843) 722-2996.

Exhibit Highlights
Springtime in Charleston highlights include a white cotton marquisette dress (pictured above), c. 1910-15, with fabulous embroidery, lace insertion and covered buttons worn by Cornelia Witsell Farrow Roebling (1866-1942) of Walterboro and Charleston. A dress of this type would have been worn with a hat, such as our wide brimmed straw hat (pictured right), c. 1910, worn by Mary Battey Nichols Wells.

Also included is a black and white silk parasol (pictured left) with wooden handle and ferule and ivory rib tips, c. 1924, owned by Gertrude Sanford Legendre (Medway Plantation). The highlight of the silk artwork is a silk batik hanging (pictured below), 1920s, by Anna Heyward Taylor (1879-1956).