A Brief History of Lacemaking (2024)

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Who doesn’t love lace? From lace knitting to lace crochet to handmade lace, delicate, openwork fabrics have remained popular for centuries. Knitted lace traditions, such as Orenburg and Estonian, continue to fill knitting books and websites with beautiful lace pieces.

However, the practice of lacemaking—not knitted lace, but the web-like fabric so often used on modern wedding gowns—didn’t really take off in Europe until the mid-sixteenth century. Historians agree that lacemaking first originated in Venice and Flanders. Venice became well-known for its needle lace, which uses a single needle and thread, while Flanders developed bobbin lace, which plaits many threads together and is generally faster.

Although lace spread across Europe, many lacemakers settled in France starting in the reign of Louis XIV. The French monarchy had been hemorrhaging money for decades by the time that Louis XIV came to the throne. Louis’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, needed to find ways to give the kingdom a lifeline of new income. He quickly realized that the aristocrats of France were spending small fortunes on handmade lace and by creating a French lace market, he could divert some of the money into the kingdom’s own pockets.

In France and across Europe, lace was used to decorate nearly everything, from collars to cuffs, gowns to furniture. There was even a hairstyle, popularized by Marie Angélique de Scorailles, which involved binding up the loose locks of a woman’s hair in a lace handkerchief. By the eighteenth century, lace had become so essential to fashion that a complicated set of rules had arisen around its use: certain colors could only be worn during certain times of day, only certain styles or weights in different seasons, and so on.

Now, lace was a commodity for the upper classes. The making of lace was incredibly expensive, involving many people and hundreds of hours of work. Near the end of the century, the middle and lower classes of France were getting quite fed up with the rampant spending of the monarchy, and you know what that means.

It’s time for the French Revolution.

The French Revolution certainly wasn’t the only thing that led to the decline of lace, but it was a key moment. During the revolution, many lacemakers were beheaded as part of the violent push-back against centuries of decadent spending by the aristocracy.

The real death-knell for handmade lace came in the early 1800s. When the Leavers loom was invented in Nottingham, England, it mechanized much of the process of lacemaking. By the mid-century, machine-made lace became so fine that even experts had difficulty telling the difference between machine-made and handmade lace.

As the commercial demand for handmade lace declined, however, new fiber arts like crochet and tatting became popular. Today, there are a number of organizations that have worked to preserve the art of lacemaking, and lace has continued to make its way into our fashions—notably, the lace on Kate Middleton’s wedding gown, which was created by a legacy lacemaker based in France.

Yours, in stitches,

Julia