There are few surviving examples of everyday garments worn by people in the early modern period. It is paradoxical that we have better indications of the expensive and rare clothes of the elites than the more common forms of apparel worn by millions of people in the past. We are left only with fragmentary evidence of the choices of what have been defined as ‘plebeian consumers’, a varied but vast category of customers that many historians have identified as central to the expansion of European consumption in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Historians are sometimes lucky and find precious evidence in unexpected places. This is the case for the thousands of fabrics now deposited at the London Metropolitan Archive. These are not the types of textiles normally collected by museums. They are in fact to be found literally pinned to the pages of large volumes of records. Each page is the record of a child left in the care of the London Foundling Hospital, an orphanage founded in the 1740s. It lists the date, gender and age as well as the ‘marks and clothing of the child’, thus suggesting that bodily and sartorial peculiarities were seen both as complementary to and sufficient to denote the identity of a person. The mother or person leaving the child also left a ‘token’, something distinctive that would allow the identification and the eventual reclamation of a child. These are moving objects, as we know that few of these children were ever reclaimed or survived the harsh conditions of the orphanage.