Silver wedding dress found in 17th-century shipwreck
The wedding dress, embroidered with heart-shaped silver motifs and adorned with round silver spangles, may have belonged to a woman from the very top of 17th-century European society.
Broken chests exposed on the Palmwood wreck were brought to the surface in 2014. Researchers at the Kaap Skil Museum, which displays the collection of artifacts recovered from the wreck, say the chests were packed with clothing, textiles, silverware, leather book covers and other goods, most likely belonging to people from the highest ranks of society centuries ago. Among the most striking items are two remarkably intact, lavish dresses: one made of silk and a wedding dress woven with silver.
The silver wedding dress on display at the Kaap Skil Museum. (Photo: Kaap Skil Museum).
Very few textiles or garments from the 17th century survive today, and finding them in a shipwreck is even rarer because fabric decomposes very quickly. Both dresses were stored together in the same chest and both use costly silver thread. The first, the silk dress, was unveiled in 2016 and is made of damask satin, a fabric woven with floral patterns. The outfit includes a bodice, ruffled sleeves and a long pleated skirt that flares out at the front, similar to Western European fashion between 1620 and 1630.
Meanwhile, the silver wedding dress was made for a special occasion and was folded into separate pieces, including a bodice and a skirt. The dress features twisted-cord embroidery in silver thread that resembles hearts, along with round silver spangles sewn onto the fabric. According to conservator Alec Ewing, the silver gave the dress a formal, glittering appearance. It is one of the most special dresses a lady from the highest level of Western European society could have worn in her lifetime. Silver tarnishes and degrades relatively quickly in seawater, but experts can still clearly see the traces and the original decorative patterns.
Today the dress is brown, but its original color was most likely white, cream or golden silk. According to Maarten van Bommel, a professor of conservation at the University of Amsterdam, there may be only two such dresses in the world. The two dresses were rinsed to remove some of the salt, but they required very little conservation work. To protect them, experts placed the dresses in special display cases filled with pressurized nitrogen, which removes all oxygen to prevent decay.
In 1660, the Palmwood, carrying a cargo of luxury goods, sank off Texel, the largest of the Wadden Islands in the North Sea. Divers first found the Palmwood wreck in 2010 at Burgzand, in the Wadden Sea east of Texel. As sand continued to wash away from the wreck, the ship was exposed enough by the summer of 2014 for divers to recover the cargo on board.
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