Natalie Rothstein was a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, specialising in the study of woven silks. She focused in particular on the development of the English silk industry from 1600 to 1850. The core of her work was published in Silk Designs of the Eighteenth Century in the Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (1990) which accompanied the V&A's Flowered Silks exhibition.

After completing a degree in Modern History at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, she became a museum assistant at the V&A in 1952. Beginning in their Art Library, she transferred to the Department of Textiles in 1955, where she remained until her retirement in 1990. In her spare time she worked on her MA research for a thesis entitled The Silk Industry in London, 1702-1766 which she completed in 1961.