AIC's 44th Annual Meeting

This case study examines the use of digital printing for the conservation treatment of an eighteenth-century Chinese painted silk robe à la polonaise in the collection of the Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The gown was accessioned into the museum’s collection in 1976 with a missing left sleeve. In anticipation of the Spring 2015 Costume Institute exhibition, China: Through the Looking Glass, it was decided to use digital printing to update the previous hand-painted replica sleeve. Digital printing was chosen for its ability to more closely reproduce the textured appearance of the eighteenth-century hand-painted fabric. Although the original fabric was created with a combination of painted pigments and block printing, the two earlier hand-painted reproductions had proved that the eighteenth-century textile was difficult to duplicate with the paints and fabric available in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Digital printing on fabric has been in practice from the late 1990s and in use in textile conservation since the early 2000s. For this treatment, we had the experience of working closely with a skilled digital printing studio to recreate the fabric. The studio, which specializes in dyeing and printing for the fashion industry, was one of the first in the United States to work with digital printing technology. This collaboration proved invaluable to the success of the project. This presentation will illustrate the challenges faced by both the conservators and the digital printing studio in the process of recreating painted historic fabric. Through a review of the treatment from start to finish, this case study presents resources and considerations for conservators using digital printing treatments in the future.