Textiles are among the least forgiving categories in the antiques trade. A chair either has its original feet or it does not; a piece of lace either was made by hand a century before machines could imitate it, or it was not, and knowing the difference depends entirely on a vocabulary most collectors never learn. Fabric lies about its age more readily than wood or silver, because fiber, weave, and dye all carry regional and period signatures that only become visible once you know what you are looking at. This glossary gathers the terms that separate a confident textile buyer from one who is simply hoping for the best.
Lace: The Vocabulary That Reveals Machine From Hand
Lace is the single most misidentified textile category in the trade, largely because machine-made lace has imitated handmade lace so successfully since the 1830s that even experienced dealers sometimes need a loupe to be certain.
- Bobbin lace — Made by braiding and twisting threads wound on weighted bobbins, worked over a pricked pattern pinned to a pillow. Recognizable by continuous threads running throughout the design; look for the characteristic “plaited” ground in styles like Honiton or Bruges.
- Needle lace — Built up stitch by stitch with a single needle and thread, using buttonhole and other looped stitches over a temporary foundation. Point de Venise and Alençon are classic examples; the surface often shows a raised, almost sculptural quality that bobbin lace lacks.
- Whitework — An umbrella term for white embroidery on white fabric, including techniques like broderie anglaise (with cut, embroidered eyelets) and Ayrshire work. Not lace in the strict sense, but frequently sold and displayed alongside it.
- Torchon lace — A coarser, geometric bobbin lace, historically inexpensive and produced in volume; useful to know because it is often mistaken for finer laces by sellers hoping to inflate value.
- Machine lace — Produced on Leavers or bobbinet machines from the 1830s onward. Tell-tale signs include a uniform, mechanically regular tension, a woven-in (rather than knotted) ground, and threads that do not trace continuously through the pattern the way hand-worked lace does.
Turn any piece of lace over. Handwork rarely looks identical from both sides; machine lace almost always does.
Construction Terms That Date a Garment
Garment construction changed dramatically across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the internal architecture of a dress often dates it more reliably than its fabric or trim.
Boning refers to rigid strips — historically whalebone, later steel or synthetic — sewn into channels within a bodice to shape and support it. The presence, material, and placement of boning helps date a garment: whalebone boning largely disappeared after World War I as steel and synthetic alternatives took over, and the channels themselves (cased in twill tape versus stitched directly into seam allowances) are period-specific tells.
Piecing describes the practice of joining smaller fabric scraps to conserve costly cloth, common in garments made before industrial weaving lowered fabric prices. Extensive piecing in an unexpected place — inside a sleeve, along an underarm gusset — often signals a homemade or provincial garment rather than a couture one, which is not a mark against it but a fact that should inform price.
Interlining is a hidden layer of fabric, often flannel or muslin, inserted between the outer fabric and lining for warmth, structure, or to protect delicate silk from body oils. Its presence and condition matter enormously for garments like Victorian outerwear, where the interlining frequently degrades before the visible fabric does.
Set-in sleeve versus raglan sleeve versus dolman sleeve each describes a different method of attaching sleeve to bodice, and each rose and fell in fashion during specific decades — useful shorthand when dating an undocumented garment.
Bias cut, the technique of cutting fabric at a 45-degree angle to the grain so it drapes with more stretch and fluidity, is strongly associated with 1930s eveningwear and is a genuine hallmark of skilled pattern-cutting; a true bias-cut gown should show characteristic diagonal seam behavior and a fluid hang that a straight-grain reproduction cannot fully replicate.
Fiber and Fabric Terms Worth Memorizing
Understanding fiber content is not merely academic — it affects both authentication and conservation.
- Chintz — A glazed cotton, traditionally block-printed or painted, historically imported from India before European mills began producing imitations; the glaze (originally a starch or wax finish) is a period-specific detail that wears unevenly with age.
- Damask — A reversible figured fabric woven on a jacquard or draw loom, with pattern and ground formed by contrasting weave structures (typically satin against plain or twill) rather than by printing or embroidery.
- Toile — Shorthand for “toile de Jouy,” a printed cotton or linen featuring detailed pastoral or narrative scenes, originally produced in Jouy-en-Josas, France, beginning in the 1760s.
- Grosgrain — A ribbed fabric or ribbon with pronounced horizontal cords, achieved through a heavier weft than warp; common in trims and ribbons across many periods, so useful mainly in combination with other dating clues.
- Moiré — Fabric, usually silk, that has been calendared (pressed between engraved rollers) to produce a rippled, watered appearance; the finish can degrade or flatten over time, which is itself a useful condition indicator.
Costume-Specific Terms for Dating and Description
Beyond fabric and construction, certain terms belong specifically to the history of dress and accessories.
Provenance of garment construction techniques matters as much in costume as it does in furniture: a bodice hand-sewn with irregular, slightly uneven stitches predates the widespread home adoption of the sewing machine in the 1860s, while perfectly uniform machine stitching after that point does not automatically indicate later manufacture, since machines were quickly adopted even for otherwise handmade garments. Learning to read the stitch — its regularity, its thread, whether it is a running stitch, backstitch, or chain stitch from an early machine — is a skill worth developing with a magnifying glass and a handful of documented reference pieces.
Passementerie refers collectively to ornamental trimmings — braid, fringe, tassels, cord — often applied to upholstery and costume alike; the materials and manufacturing technique of passementerie (hand-knotted silk versus later synthetic fiber) can be a useful dating aid independent of the garment itself.
Provenance in costume collecting often takes the specific form of a family history: a wedding dress passed down with a name and date written inside the hem, or a christening gown with a list of babies who wore it stitched onto a linen tag. This kind of documentary evidence, however informal, meaningfully increases both historical and market value, and collectors should preserve rather than remove it.
Condition Vocabulary Specific to Textiles
Textile condition reporting uses its own precise language, distinct from the “excellent/good/fair” scale used loosely elsewhere in the trade.
- Shattering — A specific failure mode of weighted silk, where metallic salts historically added to increase fabric weight cause the fibers to become brittle and split, often in a distinctive spiderweb pattern. Shattered silk cannot be reversed or effectively conserved; it can only be stabilized.
- Foxing — Small rust-colored spots caused by mold or metal impurities reacting with moisture; more commonly discussed with paper but relevant to textile linings and mounts as well.
- Fugitive dye — Dye that fades or migrates with light or moisture exposure; certain early synthetic dyes, particularly some purples and greens from the mid-to-late nineteenth century, are notoriously fugitive, and their faded state is itself a dating clue.
- Stress tears — Splits that occur along lines of wear, typically at fold lines, underarms, or wherever a garment was habitually strained; distinct from accidental damage and often unavoidable in fragile antique textiles.
Dyes, Weaves, and the Language of Origin
A surprising amount of textile dating hinges on dye chemistry, and it is worth knowing a few landmark terms even if you never intend to run a chemical test yourself. Aniline dye refers to the first wave of synthetic dyes derived from coal tar, beginning with mauveine in 1856; garments dyed with early anilines often show a distinctive, slightly harsh saturation compared to natural dyes, and many of these early synthetics are the “fugitive” colors mentioned above. Madder and cochineal are natural dyestuffs — madder root producing reds and oranges, cochineal (derived from insects) producing deep crimsons — associated with pre-industrial and early industrial textiles, and their presence can help confirm an earlier date when combined with other evidence.
Selvage (or selvedge) is the self-finished, non-fraying edge of a woven fabric, formed where the weft thread turns back on itself at the fabric’s outer boundary. Examining the selvage can reveal loom width, weaving technology, and sometimes even printed manufacturer information, since some mills stamped identifying marks directly onto the selvage.
Jacquard weave, named for Joseph Marie Jacquard’s early nineteenth-century punch-card loom attachment, allows complex woven patterns to be produced mechanically rather than by hand-manipulated heddles. Damask, brocade, and many figured silks rely on jacquard technology; recognizing the mechanical regularity of a jacquard pattern versus the subtle irregularity of hand-drawn loom work is another useful dating skill.
Brocade describes a richly figured fabric, often with supplementary weft threads (sometimes metallic) that create a raised, embroidery-like pattern woven directly into the cloth rather than stitched on afterward — distinguishing it from embroidered fabric, which achieves a similar visual effect by an entirely different process.
Accessories and Their Own Specialized Terms
Costume collecting extends well beyond garments into accessories that carry their own vocabulary. A reticule is a small drawstring handbag, popular from the late eighteenth century, that emerged when narrow Regency silhouettes made pocketed underskirts impractical. Chatelaines are decorative clasps worn at the waist with a set of chains suspending useful household items — scissors, thimble case, keys — and their completeness (how many original tools survive attached) significantly affects value. A fichu is a triangular or square piece of fabric worn draped over the shoulders and tucked into a bodice for modesty, especially common in eighteenth-century dress. Understanding these smaller categories rounds out a collector’s vocabulary and often opens up more affordable entry points into costume collecting than full garments allow.
Regional and Trade Terms Worth Recognizing
Certain terms signal geographic or trade origin and are worth committing to memory because they appear constantly in dealer descriptions. Paisley, technically a boteh or “pine cone” motif, originated in Kashmir shawl weaving and was later mass-produced in the Scottish town of Paisley using jacquard technology — genuine hand-woven Kashmir shawls command far higher prices than their machine-woven Scottish descendants, and telling them apart requires examining the weave structure on the reverse. Ayrshire work refers to a specific style of fine whitework embroidery associated with Scotland, prized for babies’ christening gowns and bonnets. Broderie anglaise, literally “English embroidery,” despite the French name is most associated with English and Irish production of cutwork eyelet embroidery. Recognizing these regional terms helps a collector cross-reference a piece’s likely origin against its construction details, catching inconsistencies that might indicate a later reproduction misrepresenting its heritage.
Building Fluency Through Handling
No glossary substitutes for handling real pieces under good light with a loupe in hand. Visit textile-focused dealers and ask to examine documented examples of bobbin versus needle lace, hand versus machine stitching, and various boning materials. Costume and textile societies frequently host study days specifically for this kind of hands-on comparison, and museum textile conservation departments sometimes welcome serious collectors to view reference collections by appointment. The vocabulary above will make far more sense once your fingers, not just your eyes, have learned to tell a knotted thread from a woven one.
Fluency in this language does more than impress at an antiques fair. It protects you from overpaying for reproduction lace sold as antique, helps you write accurate and defensible descriptions when you sell, and, most importantly, deepens the pleasure of owning objects that carry the literal handwork of people who lived a very different daily life than we do now.