Taking a moment to consider the current Nelson-Atkins textiles exhibition Worldy Luxuries: Repetition in Renaissance Textiles was a rewarding part of my week.
Gallery P6, or The Treasury, is small and securely tucked into the European galleries and P7’s Cloister.
The objects in Gallery P6, including the current exhibition's textiles, embody a piece of glitz and glamour 15th-17th century style. Many of the objects are religiously oriented, and all objects are delicately engraved and embossed. Visitors are transported to a period of elaborate reverence and given access to objects that few people of the time were able to view up-close.
The textiles shown are fragments. A moment of pause allowed me to appreciate seeing the textiles out of context. 
Take the Italian panel to the right. The dates of creation are placed between 1575 and 1625. The material is silk.
The panel's small size invites me to consider craftsmanship and the history of the piece. During the Renaissance, Middle Eastern influences abounded, including in textile production. In the panel of Italian silk, a visually pleasing pattern of strong male lions is repeated. The lion pattern is raised, dynamic, and soft. The photo to the right does not do justice to the texture of the fabric.
The production process is another layer worth unpacking. Until the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, weaving and textile production was a cottage industry. Textile production was lucrative, but there may not have been large numbers of artisans trained to produce such high-quality textiles. I envision the process was slow, intimate and complexly artistic. Each delicate silk, velvet or linen thread was individually placed, touched and guided by a weaver’s hands. All movements were completed thousands of times over. Multiply those threads seen in a fragment by the thousands of threads likely required for a man's full garment or feet-long drapery and add to the equation potentially "primitive" equipment--the total workload is quite staggering.
Because these textiles were luxury items, the people able to purchase them were members of elite and highly select groups: royalty, aristocracy, wealthy merchants. Even today’s average viewer would be in a social class far below theirs and thereby unable to access such finery. This exhibition invites all viewers into an exclusive realm and to consider the possibilities of a place and time of which we have only glimpses.