The dominant design trends for vestments in recent centuries has gone something like this: some sort of damask is used over the entirety of the vestment, with galloons separating the orphreys form the rest of the design. Sometimes, the orphreys might be gold, however, to distinguish them from the rest of the vestments -- for example, for the shield/hood on a cope, or for the Tau cross or column orphrey on the front and the back of the vestment.
There are, however, examples of much more boldly coloured vestments coming out of history, spanning various centuries. Such examples tend to be fewer and farther between and so they rarely come to the fore in the minds of many; others are entirely unaware of them and assume these sorts of things simply aren't permitted. Whether this scarcity is due to these being stylistically less popular, or whether it was simply due to the lesser availability of fabrics to work with is difficult to say -- it could be a mixture of both frankly -- but today I thought we would expand our readers' 'vestment vocabulary' by presenting some examples of these bolder, more colourful vestments, with a specific focus on copes.
It does not escape me that this style of vestment is very likely to have a "love it" or 'hate it' sort of divergent response, and that's not really of particular concern. The focus here is simply to present these historical examples so that our readers are better aware of the simple fact of their existence, as there is a value in having an greater understanding of the breadth and variety that can be found within the history of vestment arts.
Two of these vestments date to the sixteenth century, but most date to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and certainly you could find this tradition continuing, particularly within France in the nineteenth century as well.
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