Cité de la Dentelle et de la Mode - Calais Lace Museum by K2

[Deleted]

I absolutely do not have an overwhelming interest in lace or in fashion in general, but I do very much like industrial museums, and that is what drew me here. The Cité de la Dentelle opened in 2009 and it was quite a special event, because it took place of European Museum Night. The building was draped with a monumental piece of lace by Italian artist Maria Dompé. It required 80km of lace and had a special sound and light show for 10 days. My own guess is that 10 days is about the maximum you can leave lace outside exposed to the elements before it starts turning ugly.

In any case, the building is striking even without being draped in lace. A modern façade was added in front of a former lace factory.







The windows reproduce the cardboard punchcards that are required for lacemaking machines.





There were a few posters displayed concerning past and future exhibitions.



I was the first person in the museum along with a big group of schoolchildren. The children were taken into the historical section, so I headed for the temporary exhibition in the meantime.



Taiwanese women's fashion is not one of my current passions, but I am fully able to appreciate the artistic and technical efforts that go into this stuff.









Anyway, a lot of these dresses used tonnes of lace, which fully justified their presence here.

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There was a sudden shift to what was apparently woolen winterwear.

And then it was time to enter the real museum while avoiding the children to the best of my ability...

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It is hard to imagine that people actually made this completely by hand 300 years ago.













All sorts of small special tools were required to make even small pieces of lace.



Finally it was time for the Leavers machines to be smuggled in from Nottingham. The first machines arrived in 1820.

[onlyMark]

Lace played a big part of my childhood (as did coal mines, mind you. And stockings.) but this part about the machines being smuggled in from Nottingham I had no idea about. The man, Leavers, was from my home town of Sutton in Ashfield and was in the trade setting up the previous generation of lace making machines until he invented his own. His surname is by rights, Levers, but the extra letter was added many years later for no good reason, apparently by foreigners of all people huh!, but was generally adopted after the turn of the 20th century.

[Deleted]

Interesting, Mark, as I was just getting to a bit of explanation about Dentelle de Calais ® and how it is related to the Leavers system.

As a registered trademark, Dentelle de Calais ® is called that no matter where it is made, which is basically in just two places: Calais and the nearby town of Caudry. 90% of the existing Leavers machines in the world are in these two cities and 1300 employees are still employed in the industry. The detail that makes the Leavers system so special is that besides using 11,000 individual threads per machine, it also incorporates special support threads that tighten every element of the product and gives it a unique advantage over all other lace -- you can trim it or cut it anywhere with scissors, and it does not fall apart. Other lace falls apart like the wool of a jumper. Anyway, for this reason Dentelle de Calais ® is a must for the haute couture industry everywhere in the world because fashion designers often cut small motifs of lace to apply to their creations without any fear of unravelling. Anyway, 80% of all of this production is exported. The Calais site makes 80% lace for expensive lingerie and 20% for the high fashion industry. The Caudry site does the reverse -- 20% underwear and 80% fashion.

The machines do not do all of the work, though. Threads break or punch cards are damaged, and all of the mistakes have to be corrected by hand, which is extremely labour intensive and is done exclusively by women. Of course, I would not be surprised if all repair and mantenance work on the Leavers machines is done exclusively by men. And before a professional sexual revolution ever takes place, I'm pretty sure that robots will be doing just about all of that stuff anyway.

We'll be getting to the machines soon, but first some more photos of the historical lace business. Here are some pattern cards.







There were all sorts of pattern books for customers to choose what they wanted the factory to make.





and of course huge numbers of tools were required

[Deleted]

Basically, all lace is white. It is only dyed afterwards if desired. Just imagine changing the 11,000 threads in a machine to a different colour.



In previous centuries, it was all important to collect medals of merit at all of the world's fairs and other events.



And so here we are!

[Deleted]

To begin to understand these machines, you have to see one in action. For anybody who thinks it is a bit noisy, the technician said that people often worked in rooms with 20 machines in operation.



There is a demonstration 4 or 5 times a day for just a few minutes. The coloured chalk marks are just so that visitors can see the piece of lace progressing as it is made.

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The next room had videos of modern day workers explaining their jobs. I wish I had watched more of them. The room is also full of examples of how the defects are corrected.





















I'm sure that a lot of the more seasoned workers absolutely swear by this apparatus.

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The next room was about the development of the fashion industry with all of these new items to use...













Somewhere in my archives I have an identical photo of my mother in her first communion dress.









If you had never heard of frilly lace and someone said they had a 100% lace outfit, you might picture this.



Here is the principal production of Calais now -- items that not everybody gets to see.

[Deleted]

These are the kinds of defects they can actually mend -- amazing.



Yes, I admit it -- the punch cards fascinate me.



This is the machine for making them.









the magic word for Leavers



As we all know, computers can draw designs a zillion times faster now.



pedagogic tools for school groups



These are the centres of lace production in Europe. Cheaper than the Calais lace but much more expensive than the Chinese lace that has smothered the world.



some of the more modern innovations









These half size models are tools for fashion design students.



time to leave



The "resource centre" which is open to all is at the end of this corridor. It has something like 30,000 lace samples for real fanatics.

Anyway, I was quite happy with my visit but I realise that I did not really spend enough time to see everything that interested me. Therefore, some day when I am passing through Calais again, I have every intention of returning there. But that's all for this time.

[onlyMark]

Fascinating.
The machines though. I can take or leave frilly lace underwear. It can get rub quite badly on my manly bits.
It was common, and is still common at the hosiery/knitting factories around Nottingham, for their to be a high incidence of deafness and tinnitus. Many claims have been made against the factory owners.
Also common amongst the workers in this and the weaving industry is the ability to lip read - for obvious reasons. My mother, who worked initially in a factory after leaving school became quite adept, but realising the danger of the excessive noise and from knowing other older workers, left to find an office job.

Some in the UK may remember a now deceased comedian called Les Dawson. One of his characters, Ada Shufflebotham, would sometimes mouth words instead of saying them out loud. The character was based on a retired Lancashire weaving mill worker. Doing this is called mee-mawing ("Mee-mawing was a form of speech with exaggerated movements to allow lip reading employed by workers in weaving sheds" - "was a habit of Lancashire millworkers trying to communicate over the tremendous racket of the looms").

One other possibly interesting thing, is the machines, when running, ran to a rhythm, as heard in the video. Plus, and seemingly unrelated, soldiers break step when crossing a bridge. Hence, I was told by and old machine mechanic, you try not to let all the machines be running together to the same rhythm for any length of time, otherwise it is possible the factory walls will fall down and foundations collapse. (I must admit I didn't know whether to believe him and it was just something told as an 'in joke' or there was some truth in it, especially when there could be twenty, thirty or even fifty machines running at one time).

Sorry for the digression K2, but you started it with bringing my old stomping grounds of Nottingham into the thread.

[breeze]

kerouac, I'd almost rather you go to a museum and post photos and explanations on anyport than go myself. Your visit to the lace museum is fascinating, but if I'd gone, I'd have been overwhelmed and wouldn't have gotten a tenth as much out of it.

When we're in France we're close to Alencon, formerly an important center of handmade lace, as well as tiny La Perriere, which made fashion lace. Each has a lace museum. We've never been to either of them.

We did get to the Bohin needle factory museum near L'Aigle in the Orne, which I think you, kerouac, and also tod, would enjoy.

[Deleted]

Apr 5, 2017 13:37:33 GMT onlyMark said:

Fascinating.
The machines though. I can take or leave frilly lace underwear. It can get rub quite badly on my manly bits.
It was common, and is still common at the hosiery/knitting factories around Nottingham, for their to be a high incidence of deafness and tinnitus. Many claims have been made against the factory owners.
Also common amongst the workers in this and the weaving industry is the ability to lip read - for obvious reasons. My mother, who worked initially in a factory after leaving school became quite adept, but realising the danger of the excessive noise and from knowing other older workers, left to find an office job.

Some in the UK may remember a now deceased comedian called Les Dawson. One of his characters, Ada Shufflebotham, would sometimes mouth words instead of saying them out loud. The character was based on a retired Lancashire weaving mill worker. Doing this is called mee-mawing ("Mee-mawing was a form of speech with exaggerated movements to allow lip reading employed by workers in weaving sheds" - "was a habit of Lancashire millworkers trying to communicate over the tremendous racket of the looms").

One other possibly interesting thing, is the machines, when running, ran to a rhythm, as heard in the video. Plus, and seemingly unrelated, soldiers break step when crossing a bridge. Hence, I was told by and old machine mechanic, you try not to let all the machines be running together to the same rhythm for any length of time, otherwise it is possible the factory walls will fall down and foundations collapse. (I must admit I didn't know whether to believe him and it was just something told as an 'in joke' or there was some truth in it, especially when there could be twenty, thirty or even fifty machines running at one time).

Sorry for the digression K2, but you started it with bringing my old stomping grounds of Nottingham into the thread.

It was an excellent digression, Mark. That is exactly the kind of comment and added information that we are generally all hoping for.

It is completely true that the same rhythm of vibration can make just about anything collapse if it goes on long enough. Luckily heavy equipment does not get synchronised too often, but too many soldiers walking in step are a real danger on flimsy bridges. It's like hitting the same spot over and over again with a hammer -- sooner or later, something's got to give.

[onlyMark]

In saying that though, banging my head against a brick wall repeatedly doesn't seem to change anything other than give me a headache.

[Deleted]

Ah, but if you and 100 of your closest friends do it in unison, everything changes.

[bixaorellana]

Really fascinating. Even after seeing it all, it's impossible for me to conceive of people turning out lace by hand or someone actually inventing a way to make it by machine. I remember watching a historical drama that took place in the early 1900s. A woman is no longer able to sell her beautiful hand made lace because machine-made was so much cheaper.

When my family lived in Madrid in the '50s, the Spanish girls and boys only went to school together until the age of twelve, at which time the sexes were segregated. The boys went on to study math and science, but the girls learned things like watercolors and lace making -- skills appropriate for gentlewomen of medieval times. My little Spanish friends had stiff bolsters with pins and bobbins for lace making, something that made me happy to be a little American child.

The idea of the punch cards for making those elaborate designs is mind-boggling. I knew about the jacquard system and was most interested to see the explanation of how it evolved to be used for lace making.

I liked seeing the use of lace through the ages, but have to say that some of the contemporary stuff shown in #8 is downright tacky looking.