ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is four late eighteenth-century court dresses from the National Museum of History in Mexico City. The provenance, the evidence of personal taste, and the close similarities in size suggest that these dresses were created for and worn by the same woman, whose identity has remained unknown, though in this chapter we propose an educated guess. Following a material culture perspective, we suggest that these dresses showcase unique features of New Hispanic taste. These features were defined by completing object-based research and correlating visual and archival sources with close observation, imaging techniques, and microscopy.
