The Textile Museum has large, significant holdings of silk textiles woven and embroidered in Spain and the Ottoman, Safavid/Qajar, and Mughal empires from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, including many masterpieces and works that establish unbroken artistic and stylistic changes. The museum’s extensive Central Asian ikat collection—one of the largest in North America—represents the art form's stylistic and technical changes throughout the nineteenth century.