Modern lace fashions inspired by Marie Antoinette

 

Last week we looked at some of the eighteenth century lace from the Marie Antoinette exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but this week we’ll see some examples from the exhibition of how modern fashion designers have been inspired by her style to use lace in their creations. Some of these gowns were made for actresses portraying her in films and others were designed for the catwalk.

The Christian Dior gown at the top of this post was made for the actor Emilia Schule who played the title role in Banijay’s series Marie Antoinette in 2023. The image here shows details of the silk layers trimmed with machine-made lace.

This wedding dress was designed by the Vivienne Westwood fashion house in 2025. It includes a paniered skirt and train made of machine-made, Chantilly-style lace, combined with a stiff, lace-covered bodice, none of which would have looked out of place in eighteenth century France. However, where a period gown would have a full skirt, this one instead has a gathered mini skirt revealing the model’s legs. It also features a lovely veil made of fine net, edged with the same lace as the gown.

This gown, designed by Alessandro Michele for Valentino in 2025, also has a paniered silhouette and train and incorporates layers of floral lace. It was inspired by Marie Antoinette’s private hideaway, the Petit Trianon, and reflects the idea of an idealised countryside lifestyle with shepherdesses in the fields.

This older design inspired by Marie Antoinette was made in about 1923 by the Boué Soeurs. They were known for their ‘lingerie dresses’ and their advertisements featured models as shepherdesses. These references to the Petit Trianon, relaxation and idyllic countryside reflect the life of Marie Antoinette and the scandal she caused when she was painted in a simple muslin dress, which the public considered to be nothing more than underwear. This lingerie dress features paniers under a lace and silk chiffon skirt, embellished with dainty ribbon roses reflecting the bucolic theme and the fashion house, which incorporated a rose on its labels.

These dresses aren’t actual lace, but I couldn’t resist including them. The one thing everyone thinks they know about Marie Antoinette is that she uncaringly said ‘Let them eat cake’ when she heard that French peasants were starving. However there is no evidence she said anything of the sort and the story did not appear until 50 years after her death, so it does seem unlikely. However, these silicone dresses designed by Jeremy Scott for Moschino in 2020-2021 are lace-like and great fun and reflect the fantasy and excess of what has become known as the Marie Antoinette style.

Lace in the V&A Marie Antoinette exhibition

 

Although several of the artefacts in this exhibition at the V&A Museum in London once belonged to Marie Antoinette, such as the chemise she wore in prison before her execution, her prayer book, a shoe, and items from her dressing table, none of the lace on display can be attributed to her. However, the examples are typical of the time and are similar to lace she would have worn. The image shows a detail of a beautiful silk embroidered robe from about 1780 embellished with white silk bobbin lace and net.

The first garment on display in the exhibition is a beautiful silver brocade, silk gown and train worn in 1774 by Marie Antoinette’s sister in law, a future Queen of Sweden. It is thought to be a copy of the dress 14-year-old Marie Antoinette wore on her wedding day in 1770 to the 15-year-old Louis-Auguste, Dauphin of France, the future king Louis XVI.

Paintings of the wedding show Marie Antoinette sparkling in this formal court dress, known as a robe de cour. The extensive train is edged with silver bobbin lace which is attached from the bodice and round the circumference of the train. Silver lace is made from a core of thread wrapped in silver so is quite stiff and does not gather well. Applying it to the fabric in this way allows it to catch the light and shimmer. It would have looked spectacular in candlelight.

This bodice stiffened with whalebone is similar to ones Marie Antoinette would have worn at the French court. These bodices were very uncomfortable and her mother, the Austrian empress Maria Theresa, writing in one of her numerous letters to her daughter offers to send her a more comfortable one from Vienna. This bodice dates from about 1760 and is embellished with rows of silver bobbin lace in a scalloped design.

Lighter more delicate lace at this time was mainly needle made and the exhibition includes these fine Alençon lace borders dating from 1780-1820. This type of lace would have been used to edge sleeves and frills.

These two pieces of lace are lappets, which were lengths of lace that hung down either side of a cap. Some hung over the ears, others down the back and lappets could also be pinned up on the top of the head. I have not seen any paintings of Marie Antoinette wearing lappets, although her hair is always ornately dressed and she often wears hats, feathers, and jewels on her head. Perhaps lappets were out of fashion by this time or were a fashion for older women. The lower lappet in the image is Alençon lace but the upper one is from Argentan. These two towns were both famous for their fine needle lace and the styles were similar. The main difference is in the ground stitches that form the net. The  Alençon mesh is made up of fine blanket stitches with an extra twist giving a square appearance, while for the Argentan mesh each side of the net is overstitched in blanket stitch making a more solid hexagonal mesh. These are the types of lace that Marie Antoinette would have been familiar with and would have worn. The exhibition also includes more modern examples of lace that fashion designers have used in garments inspired by the Marie Antoinette style but we’ll look at those another day.

Lace making pins

 

Pins are an essential part of bobbin lace making as they are the temporary structures around which the threads are worked to make the lace. They come in many different lengths, widths and metals to suit the type of lace being made. Pins were originally made in two parts: the long pointed shaft and the head. The first types of head were made of wire twisted into a sphere and then attached to the shaft by compression. Later, solid heads were made with a small hole at the base into which the shaft was pushed and kept in place by the tightness of the fit. As you can imagine the heads often came off these pins and the lacemakers improvised to replace them with blobs of sealing wax or seed heads. Pins with permanently attached heads were not made commercially in England until the mid 1830s.

The image at the top shows modern stainless steel pins in the background with some interesting antique pins in the foreground. These pins were made using two brass pins joined together. You can see from the picture of the individual pin that the heads of the two pins were joined, then some small coloured beads were threaded on to the top pin and the end sealed off. Thomas Wright, in his history of East Midlands English lace areas, says this was done by using the head from another pin, so that one pin was wasted to make one of these longer pins. This seems unlikely to me as pins would have been precious and few lacemakers would have wanted to waste one. Also the close up shows a pin with a blob of sealing wax at the top to stop the beads falling off. Of course the sealing wax could have been used over the head of another pin, but I would have thought that if the sealing wax did the job that is what the lacemakers would have used. Of the four pins in the main image three seem to have sealing wax heads and one has a pin head. These long, decorated pins were known as limicks or bugles in Buckinghamshire, as King pins in Bedfordshire and as strivers throughout the lacemaking area.

Wright suggests that limicks were used to decorate the lace pillow, but strivers were used to measure the amount of lace produced in a given time. The striver pin was either used in the footside of the lace pattern at the start of the period or pinned beside the lace on the pillow. It was then possible to measure from the striver pin to the end of the lace to see how much lace had been made in a period of time. Striver pins were used in the lace schools to encourage the children to work harder and compete with each other to produce the most lace in a given time. Lacemakers today still use decorative pins, both as strivers and to beautify our lace pillows, like this lovely set of rose pins I bought in the Misuyabari needle shop in Kyoto, Japan.

Needle-made lace from an old DMC booklet

 

This lace comes from an old DMC booklet on needle-made lace, which gives patterns, instructions and thread suggestions for the home needlewoman. The author is Therese de Dillmont, which surprised me, because she died in 1890 and this booklet gives the impression of being from a slightly later time, as the fashions are Edwardian rather than Victorian. It led me to do some further research and I discovered that DMC continued to publish books in de Dillmont’s name after her death because her name was such an asset to the company. Another confusion is that her niece had the same name as her and they published books in her name too.

Therese de Dillmont was an Austrian needleworker and author who ran an embroidery school with her sister, owned several needlework shops in major European capital cities and wrote many books and pamphlets about needlework including her famous Encyclopaedia of needlework, which was published in 1886. She collaborated with the French thread company Dollfus-Mieg et Cie (DMC) and their joint publications promoted the company’s threads and became known for their clear instructions and illustrations.

The booklets included patterns printed on a strong flexible paper rather like Vilene fabric, which they called ‘lace paper’. These could be cut out and used directly for working on to although they do give instructions for pricking through them to make copies if needed.

The booklet then shows how the design on the pattern was outlined with a couched thread and the filling stitches worked across the pattern areas. This image shows how blanket stitch was used to fill the design and how bars of blanket stitch, worked over a thread, were used to join areas together. It also shows how the outlines of the design elements were edged with blanket stitch to give a more three-dimensional appearance to the lace. I was interested to see that all the images show the stitches being worked with the needle pointing away from the worker, as I have always worked them the other way up with the needle pointing towards me, but the final effect seems to be the same.

The booklet also gives some suggestions for how the needle-made lace motifs and trims could be used as decoration for fashion and household items. The designs are beautiful and the instructions are very clear so I can see why these booklets have stood the test of time and why de Dillmont’s encyclopaedia is still used by many needlewomen today.  

Fashionable blonde lace in 1831

 

This fashion plate comes from an 1831 edition of The Ladies Pocket Magazine and depicts an evening dress made of ‘Indian green crape over gros de Naples’. The low neckline is formed of deep folds, which are crossed at the front, and trimmed with blonde lace in the mantilla style.

This image gives a better idea of the full ensemble and shows that the beret style sleeves are also decorated with blonde lace and the skirt features a trim of blonde lace above a line of satin rouleau. I’m intrigued by this trim which has the scallops of the lace pointing upwards, which would make them stand up from the background material to accentuate them but might result in them flopping over which would surely spoil the effect of a continuous line.

Blonde lace was very fashionable from about 1805 to 1835 and this image shows a detail of a typical example. Blond is a handmade bobbin lace composed of a large area of fine net ground with the main design worked along the edge in thick lustrous silk, which was usually a blonde creamy colour but could also be made in black thread. The background net or ground is made of lille net, which is also used for many other fine laces, and is made by one cross and three twists of the thread for each unit of the net. The floral motifs are worked in whole and half stitch and outlined with a thicker gimp thread. The finest blonde lace was made in France and Belgium, particularly in the area around Caen. The nineteenth century lace historian Mrs Palliser says that the white lace was made in the open air in the summer to preserve the purity of the white thread and the black variety was made inside in the winter. However, in the winter no lace was made near the smoke from the fireplace and instead the lacemakers worked in the lofts over their cow sheds so that the warmth of the animals kept them warm. At least, according to Palliser, the lacemakers earned more for making blonde lace than for other types of lace but it still seems a hard way to earn a living. And if you’re wondering what the elegant young lady in green is wearing around her neck it isn’t lace or fabric but an ermine boa.

Lace curtains and valances

 

I’ve been doing more research into lace curtains and this week have been looking at valances. A valance is a short piece of fabric that hangs down above the top of a window curtain or from a canopy above a bed or from a shelf. Curtain valances became popular when pull-up curtains were introduced at the end of the 17th century to hide the pulleys and cords required to do the pulling up. Pelmets could also be used to hide the curtain tracks, but they were generally fairly rigid and were made of fabric, wood or metal. Lambrequins were also used for the same purpose and were also made of fabric. It seems to me that in general: pelmets were rigid and fixed to the wall; lambrequins were similar to valances but firmer and often had long extended sides and were shaped with scalloped edges and trimmed with fringes; while valances were softer and often made of draped or gathered material. However, as with all fashions, there was a lot of mixing and matching and none of the definitions are rigid. For example the image at the top of this post showing an 1895 curtain design includes a pelmet below a curtain rod, drapery and a valance, as well as three sets of curtain panels, in lace, silk and velvet.

This image shows a slightly earlier style from 1878 with a lambrequin covered in lace-like material and fringing over three pairs of curtains. These are made up of an inner pair of lace curtains reaching the sill of the window, a fine fabric or net curtain drawn to one side and a pair of heavier curtains tied back with tasselled cords.

This image from 1928 shows a simpler style but one that incorporates more lace. It comes from a catalogue produced by the Scranton lace company showing how different rooms in the home could be furnished using their products. This one is described as an ‘early American bedroom’ and shows the room decorated with lace curtains at the window, a lace tester and valance above the bed and a bedspread with a valance reaching down to the floor. It is interesting to note that by this time the term ‘valance’ also described fabric that hung down from the bed to screen the space underneath it, which shows how the definitions of these terms subtly change over time.

Filet lace cupids for Valentine’s day

 

I thought some lace depicting cupids would be appropriate for this time of year with St Valentine’s day falling on 14 February. This piece of lace is one of a pair of narrow curtains made in filet lace. It is not antique, but is handmade and was probably produced in the Far East some time in the last 50 years.

It includes flowers as well as six cupids, some lying down and others playing musical instruments or catching butterflies. The design is quite simple and open, which works well for curtains that are designed to let in the light but screen the interior of the house from the gaze of passers by.

The lace is made in several stages and is more complicated than it appears. This close-up image shows the knots of the netting and the thread patterns of the linen stitch. The first stage is to make the background net, which is done with a knotting technique, in a process similar to that for making fishermen’s nets. The open squares of the net have to be the same size to produce neat designs and this is ensured by using a guide bar over which the loops of the net are formed.

Once the net is made, it is held taut in a frame, and the toile or linen stitches that form the pattern are worked into it. Each patterned square of net includes two vertical and two horizontal threads woven over each other and the outer threads of the square mesh.

However, rows and blocks of stitches are worked together with a continuous thread so the thread paths have to be determined before the work starts and can be quite complicated as you can see from this simple circular shape. The linen stitch diagram and this photograph of work in progress both come from Pauline Knight’s book The technique of filet lace, first published in 1980, which gives instructions for netting and stitching and includes much historical information from Pauline’s extensive research. If you are interested in finding out more about filet lace this book is an excellent place to start. Happy Valentines day!

Figures in early lace

 

Many early laces from the 16th and 17th century depict people. Some are mythical creatures like gods, goddesses and putti and others are people in contemporary dress. They were made in a variety of types of lace and patterns were available in books such as Le Pompe, published in 1559 for bobbin lace, and Federico Vinciolo’s 1587 pattern book for needle and filet lace. The image above comes from a 1617 pattern book published by Cesare Vecellio and depicts the four seasons and some dancing figures. The seasons are shown in classical dress while the dancers wear contemporary clothes. The pattern is designed to be worked in needlelace.

These lovely corner designs are printed in the same pattern book and again are patterns for needlelace. The books would not have included any instructions for working the patterns, as it was assumed the ladies who brought them had the required knowledge to work them from these illustrations.

This angel is worked in needlelace and is a detail from an illustration in Elisa Ricci’s book on Italian lace designs. It was made in the 17th century and is made to appear more three-dimensional than the previous images with the incorporation of thicker threads around parts of the lace, such as the halo and the feathers in the angel’s wings.

Another illustration from the same book is this detail of a tablecloth made up of alternating squares of embroidery and lacis work. Lacis was popular in the 16th century and many books included patterns for this type of lace which is basically darning on fine net. The net was made first ensuring that the squares were all the same size by using a gauge. It was then held taut in a frame while the design was worked by passing a needle and thread through the holes in the net, to darn some solid areas and make more open looped patterns in others.

Figures could also be made in bobbin lace as you can see in this lace made from a pattern in Le Pompe. It is a complicated pattern and requires threads to be added and removed as it is worked. The original pattern would not have included any working instructions but Santina Levey and Patricia Payne in their book about the Le Pompe patterns included instructions for making the laces. Forty pairs of bobbins were used to make the lace and two different threads were used, a fine one for the figures and a thicker one for the plaits. If you are interested in early laces this book is very helpful because it describes the way early laces were made and also explains how to make lace prickings from the original woodcut patterns.

Inspiration from the gothic tale of Paul Ferroll

 

Much of my practice is inspired by gothic novels and in particular the way many of them critique the position of women in society. I tend to combine gothic tropes such as veiling and nets with lace to suggest some of these ideas. The image above shows a net curtain inspired by a little-known gothic novel entitled Paul Ferroll by Caroline Clive. The eponymous ‘hero’ of this novel murders his wife at the beginning of the story and evades justice at the end. My net curtain presents the voice of the murdered wife as she speaks from beyond the grave to give her side of the story. The idea being that the net has sieved her words out of the ether in the home where she remains a ghostly presence.

I am not the only one to find this story troubling. It seems a strange subject for a nineteenth century novel aimed at a mainly female readership. Many readers complained to the author about the outcome of the story, so when the book was republished she added an extra final  chapter in which Paul Ferroll, having escaped from prison and fled to America with the help of his daughter, caught a fever and died. The implication being that he was punished by natural justice rather than the hangman’s noose. Many readers weren’t satisfied with that explanation either, so Caroline Clive wrote a prequel to the story with the unsurprising title: Why Paul Ferroll killed his wife. This story explains how he met both his first and  second wife and how the former tricked him into marriage – so what else could he do but murder her! I still don’t find this a valid explanation for murder but wisely Caroline Clive gave up trying to persuade her readers that Paul Ferroll was a real hero and published no more stories about him. Although you have to admire her for cleverly building up indignation against him and selling two books about the same subject!

The ambiguity of veiling

 

One of the reasons I am so interested in veiling is because of its ambiguity. It can conceal or reveal, it can hide or highlight, it is worn by nuns as well as exotic dancers, it is associated with both marriage and mourning. I have used this ambiguity in my practice by using veils as a means of exploring feminism and the place of women in society. Veiling is also associated with gothic novels - just think of Wilkie Collins’ story The woman in white. Many of these nineteenth century novels were also written to critique the position of women and highlight their lack of legal rights. As those writers knew, it is often easier to get across your point of view if you engage the reader by telling them a story rather than laying out a series of dry facts. Consequently, I have made bridal veils linked to actual gothic heroines such as Tess of the Durbevilles (there’s more about this veil in my 7 January post) and Miss Havisham, but have also used gothic tropes to make lace veils incorporating the words No, no, no or Help me. The main image also includes a veil reflecting on the life of Charlotte Bronte and I have also used Jane Austen’s life as inspiration for another one.

All of those pieces were wedding veils, but I have also made black mourning veils to reflect the darker aspects of gothic tales. One of these is ‘Belladonna’, which you can see in the image above. The design of the lace trim on this veil was inspired by the leaves and berries of the deadly nightshade plant (Atropa belladonna to give it its Latin name). The gold thread running through it suggests that the widow may not be surprised or devastated by her husband’s demise. I’m always intrigued when I exhibit these veils that prospective brides ask if they are for sale and I wonder if they have actually read the labels!

Broken lace bobbins

Lace bobbins are prone to wear and tear because they are used so often and sometimes they break, especially at the top. The head of the bobbin is the thinnest part and also receives the most tension, as this is where the thread is wound round and looped to keep it in place. A common breakage occurs at the very top of the head, like the bobbin on the right in the image here. The bobbin can still be used as the thread can be looped just below the bulb but the bobbin won’t hang quite straight and there is more wear on the thread. Also the break may leave a rough edge on which the thread can catch and it is interesting that the top of this bobbin has been covered with a dot of sealing wax to smooth it off so the lacemaker can continue to use it.

The second bobbin on the right here has also lost its head and the lacemaker has decided not to repair it but to repurpose it. She has removed the head completely and ground the remaining neck down into a point and removed the spangle of beads from the tail of the bobbin. In its new form as a stiletto. It can now be used for broderie anglaise lacework. To do this it would be pushed through fabric to make a hole which the lacemaker would then sew round in blanket stitch, similar to the embroidery in the image above although that is not handmade and has been worked with a machine. It is impossible to know how the wooden bobbin was broken, but I think it originally had channels of lead or pewter as decorations and these either fell out completely or were beginning to fall out, making the surface rough and difficult to work with. More metal has been used to cover the surface and make the bobbin smooth again.

The bobbin on the far left has been very skilfully repaired. The neck must have broken and the top of a wooden bobbin has been cut to splice the two together to make it useable again. Pinned in place with a metal rivet this bobbin feels just a secure as the day it was first made. I have seen other bobbins repaired in this way so I think this was done professionally and was probably a service that bobbin makers offered their customers. What I like most about these repaired bobbins is the fact that they were so well loved that even when they broke their owners still wanted to use them and so repaired or repurposed them.

Wedding veils – happy ever after?

 

These wedding veils bring a gothic eye to traditional fairy tales and question the idea of marriage being the ultimate dream for fictional heroines. The image above shows the No, no, no veil, on the left, designed for the reluctant bride, and a veil celebrating Thomas Hardy’s heroine Tess of the Durbevilles on the right. The ‘No, no, no veil’ was inspired by the idea of a reluctant bride, who is forced into an unwanted marriage, using her bobbins and thread, the only means of discourse she possesses, to reveal her inner thoughts and appeal for help. The veil on the right references the episode in Tess of the Durbeville’s story where she writes a note to Angel Clare on the night before they marry, telling him about her past, in case that knowledge would cause him to change his mind. It is only once they are married that she realises he did not find the note and when she confesses her chequered past he rejects her. The disintegrating paper represents the hidden note and the fragility of the marriage. The veil is entitled ‘Paper trail’ reflecting the path the story follows after the confusion over this slip of paper, which eventually leads to Tess’s trial and sad end.

This veil with its sparkling fringe reflects the allure of marriage for the gothic heroine. From a distance this sparkling fringe appears to be made of soft, smooth thread but closer inspection reveals that it is composed of rows of hard, sharp pins. Its title ‘Pinned down’ suggests the sharp reality of conjugal bliss and domesticity. These veils are part of a series based on research into Victorian gothic novels and domesticity and their relevance to contemporary life.

Stitched QR codes and what they can reveal

 This embroidered QR code links through to my website when you read it with a smartphone. However I first became interested in using QR codes as a way of hiding information in plain sight in a decorative way. The idea being that the message could easily be overlooked in the same way as domestic textiles and their makers often are. I sometimes hide text within lace patterns but QR codes can contain much more information in a smaller space. QR codes do have to be quite exact though for the camera on a smart phone to recognise them. My first attempts were made in black bobbin lace but they were not reliable enough to work every time. I tried working the codes at an angle so the squares were cloth stitch diamonds and alternatively with the squares as tallies, but neither worked very well. I also experimented with crochet squares but they became too large for the backgrounds I wanted. I then tried cross stitch embroidery straight onto my background net but that wasn’t reliable either. Eventually I found that cross stitch embroidery on counted thread fabric was the most effective way of producing the QR codes.

This curtain Insider information contains many coded messages that together form a narrative about the domestic environment. The words ‘Help me’ are stitched in human hair on to the curtain, which also includes an embroidered QR code. The code can be read to reveal the words ‘Escape while you can’ while the human hair contains the DNA of the seamstress. Combined with the veil of the curtain they seem a cry for help and a warning to others. Both types of embroidery reference Victorian domestic needlework, such as samplers and mourning brooches, and hint at a gothic tale of confinement and control.