William Wissing’s portrait of Elizabeth Jones, the 18th Countess of Kildare, dressed as a shepherdess provided the inspiration for this recreation of a Baroque-era fancy dress costume.

My focus was on recreating the costume’s bold colours and intense, intricate patterns using printing and dyeing techniques. A 17th-century seamstress would have spent weeks on end creating the high level of decoration; modern printing processes allowed me to reproduce the delicate design in a fraction of the time.

In the countess’s time, it was a trend to fuse elements of working-class attire with upper-class evening wear. For the reproduction, I sourced luxurious fabrics to signal the status of the wearer and carried out detailed research into historical accounts, depictions and surviving garments, covering topics from the history of the masquerade ball to the development of pattern weaving.