Lint van lila gaas c. 1900 - 1915

This is a roll of lilac gauze ribbon by Gustav Schnitzler and it is kept at the Rijksmuseum. Textiles can tell us a lot about the society in which they were produced. A historian might ask: what was the social status of the person who made this? How were textiles traded at the time? What does it tell us about the time in which it was produced? The Industrial Revolution saw the rise of factories churning out textiles. This made fabrics more widely available. The lilac colour might also give us insight into the fashions of the day. To find out more, we can look at fashion plates, advertisements, and other documents of the period to understand better how the people of the time used textiles to express themselves. The meaning of art is always contingent on social and institutional context.