Queen Victoria’s Banarasi Brocade: A Transcultural Approach to Royal Fashion

The fancy-dress costume worn by Queen Victoria (1819–1901) to her Stuart Ball in 1851 is an outlier amongst her surviving wardrobe. As an object of fancy dress, it combines the fashions of the mid-nineteenth century with those of the 1660 to produce a garment that is both fashionable and highly symbolic. While previous scholars and exhibition curators have been most interested in the dress as a window into Queen Victoria's fashionable style and entertainments at Buckingham Palace, the materiality of the dress tells a deeper story. Made in the same year as the Great Exhibition, from the products of British colonial networks and structures, this dress is reflective of far more than a young woman's fanciful tastes. The materials used firmly tied it to the mid-nineteenth century, particular with the inclusion of an Indian Banaras Brocade silk underskirt. It was the costume of a queen, worn to a highly publicized event. Reconsidering the costume as a transcultural garment broadens its significance and symbolism, reframing analysis of this costume to consider the recontextualization of Indian fabric and within this British royal fashion object.