ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses practices of designing and making dresses and drapery by genteel and middle-class women in the first half of the nineteenth century. By looking at sources such as fashionable periodicals, etiquette manuals and literary and visual representations of the fabric, it suggests that between 1800 and 1850 a historically specific ontological continuum existed between dress, drapery and female identity. The chapter explores muslin's double role as domestic and feminine decoration was the result of particular aesthetic effects engendered by the fabric's unique interaction with ambient light. Muslin's material qualities were encouraged to exercise a mode of aesthetic agency upon states of feminine embodied consciousness. The chapter presents the amateur creativity and the nature of the mutually constituting relationship of muslin and women, but moves away from a focus on the immediate and intimate sphere of female bodily adornment to consider instead women's role in the aesthetic management of the middle-class household.
