Enfilade

清中期 納紗繡戯服男帔 / Theatrical Robe for a Male Role, second half of the 18th century, silk florentine stitch embroidery on silk gauze, 140.7 x 226.7 cm (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 32.30.10).

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Now on view at The Met:

Chinese Textiles: Ten Centuries of Masterpieces from the Met Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, London, 15 August 2015 — 19 June 2016

This installation, which explores the cultural importance of silk in China, showcases the most important and unusual textiles from the Museum’s collection. In addition to three rare pieces dating from the Tang dynasty (618–906), when China served as a cultural hub linking Korea and Japan to Central and West Asia, and ultimately to the Mediterranean world, the exhibition also includes eleventh- and twelfth-century tapestries from Central Asia, as well as contemporaneous Chinese examples of this technique.

Spectacular embroideries—including an imperial fourteenth-century canopy decorated with phoenixes and flowers, and a monumental late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century panel showing phoenixes in a garden—are also on view, together with theatrical garments, court costumes, and early examples of badges worn at court to designate rank.