History's Runway: A Pair of Leather Gloves with Silver Embroidery, 1660

The Victoria & Albert Museum

In the Seventeenth Century, no one dared leave the house without gloves, both for reasons of fashion and hygiene.  A person’s gloves, like the rest of his or her ensemble, would have been a great indicator of their class and social status.  Here’s a pair of gloves which would have belonged to someone well-born and very wealthy.

Let’s remember that this was a period of history when personal hygiene revolved around the masking of body odors rather than something more practical like washing them away.  So, very often gloves were perfumed, allowing a convenient, literally handy way of masking unpleasant natural aromas.   During this period, gloves were scented with ingredients such as musk, ambergris, floral extracts and aromatic spices.

A glove like this one would certainly have been scented with spices.   A work of lushly deocarted leather, these gloves are adorned with silver and silver-gilt embroidery on the gauntlet, with an underlay of coral-coloured silk ribbon.


The silver and gold have been applied in a variety of forms: strip (broad, flat length of metal), purl (a tube of densely coiled metal), thread (a thin strip of metal wrapped around a linen or silk thread) and spangles (known today as sequins).  This is the perfect example of a Seventeenth Century glove when the gauntlets became smaller and the length of the fingers shortened to more natural proportions.