Abstract
This study studies the fabrics from excavated 17th century tombs of Mrs. Min from Yeoheung family(1586~1656), Yeo-on Kim(1596~1665) and Won-rip Choi(1618~1690) and attempts to clarify the relationship between the fashion trend in fabrics of those times and the background behind it by viewing and examining the proportion of twill fabrics to the total silk fabrics and the characteristics of its weave and patterns. Looking into fabrics from the above tombs, twill fabrics accounted for 10.4%(13 pieces) 19.3%(16 pieces) and 9.2%(9 pieces) of total silk fabrics in each of the respective tombs. This forms a remarkable contrast with the fact that there was only one piece of twill silk fabrics(0.5%) and not any from the 16th century tombs of Mrs. Yoon from Papyeong family (0.5%) and Soo-ryoon Sim(0%). In particular, the percentage of hwamun-neung(patterned twill fabrics) in each of the tombs is 8.0%(10 pieces), 13.3%(11 pieces), 9.2%(9 pieces), which is much higher than that of non-patterned one. This is common to the twill fabrics from above three 17th century tombs. Patterns of hwamun-neung(patterned twill), simplified small flower patterns or geometrical figures, from the three excavated tombs are mostly arranged sporadically with blank space. It is supposed that these figurative characteristics reflected the aesthetic sense of the gentry at that time which valued simplicity and moderation for their Confucian standard. This phenomenon of increased use and production of twill fabrics in the 17th century resulted from different factors such as wars like Japanese Invasion of Korea(1592~1598), economic difficulty, government regulations against the production of high-class fabrics, development of weaving skill and its fixation, changes of fabric production environments, and changes of aesthetic sense preferring naive and moderate things to showy ones. As for the weaving characteristics of twill fabrics from the three 17th century tombs 3 leaf warp-faced twill was often used for the ground texture and 4 leaf warp-faced one was occasionally used. For pattern texture 6 leaf weft-faced twill was frequently used, 4 leaf weft-faced twill and 3 leaf weft-faced twill were used at times, and floating one was occasionally used as well.