When mothers surrendered babies to London's Foundling Hospital from 1741, the institution recorded each child by attaching a scrap of fabric, often cut from the mother's or baby's own clothing, as an identifying token in case she returned to reclaim the child. These thousands of swatches, mostly cheap printed cottons and linens, survive as a dated archive of what poor and labouring women actually wore in the 18th century.
The everyday clothing of ordinary people almost never enters museum collections because it was worn out, remade, or discarded, so surviving garments overrepresent the elite and the ceremonial. The Foundling tokens preserve humble fabrics precisely because they were detached from their function as clothing and reassigned as bureaucratic identifiers.
A fragment of fabric can be read not only for its weave, dye, and price but as a trace of the choices and feelings of the person who selected or cut it, since a mother chose what to leave. Reading cheap cloth this way recovers taste, aspiration, and attachment among people who left no written record.
Brightly patterned printed cottons and linens, far from being purely elite goods, were widely owned and chosen by labouring women in 18th-century London, who had access to colour and fashionable pattern through cheaper fabrics. The variety and liveliness of the tokens shows that poverty did not mean an absence of style or choice in dress.