Video: 17th century wedding dress found in ship remains near Texel

An ancient wedding dress was found in ship remains near Texel. The 17th-century garment was made of silk with silver embellishments woven into it. Originally it must have sparkled, but it has turned brown over the years it spent on the seabed. It is now extremely vulnerable, said curator Alec Ewing of the Texel Museum.

The museum showed the wedding dress to the outside world for the first time on Friday. From Sunday, the public can go see it in Museum Kaap Skil on Texel.

It is impossible to determine who owned the wedding dress, but the garment must have belonged to “a lady from the highest social class in Western Europe.” Ewing estimates that the dress must have cost thousands of euros. It may have belonged to a noblewoman, but “certainly there were merchant families in Amsterdam at the time who were multi-millionaires by modern standards. They were richer than royal houses and financed wars. For ordinary people, such a dress would have cost many annual incomes. For them, it was completely impossible and unrealistic to buy such a thing.”

The dress was in a chest full of textiles. Divers found the box in 2014 east of Texel, on the bottom of the Wadden Sea. The chest probably came from a merchant ship that had sunk there around 1650. That ship was carrying boxwood from the Mediterranean and is therefore referred to as the Palmwood Wreck. Though the museum can’t say for certain the chest came from that ship. According to Ewing, there are about 15 ships it could come from.

Another dress came from that same chest in a much better condition. That dress was presented in 2016. According to the museum, the wedding dress was only discovered this year because there were many loose pieces of textile in the chest. They have to be treated very carefully, and, therefore, it takes time to determine what kind of garments are involved.

The chest also contained book covers with the coat of arms of the British royal house, but these could be samples from a printer.