Lace, Reconsidered

The art, craft and inherited knowledge behind Coutille’s British-made Leavers lace.

Lace is unusual among fabrics. It is made as much from absence as from material, its pattern emerging through the relationship between thread and open space. At its most intricate, it sits somewhere between textile and drawing, with light, skin or another fabric completing what the thread leaves open.

For centuries, this complexity made fine lace one of fashion’s most precious materials. Today, its appearance is familiar, but that familiarity can obscure the distinction between something that simply looks like lace and a textile created through generations of specialist knowledge. It was this distinction that drew Coutille to Leavers lace.

An Art Form in Thread

Unlike a conventional woven fabric, true lace creates both its pattern and its structure from thread itself. Flowers, geometric forms and intricate lines can appear almost suspended, held together by a network fine enough to reveal the surface beneath.

This combination of intricacy and transparency has always been part of lace’s fascination. Historically, the skill and time required to achieve it made fine lace an object of considerable value, worn, preserved and passed between generations. Its beauty lies not only in the motif, but in the making.

The Leavers Loom

Leavers lace brought extraordinary complexity to loom-made lace. Developed from John Leavers’ early nineteenth-century invention and later combined with Jacquard patterning, the process allows an intricate design and its fine net ground to be created together.

At Cluny, Leavers looms twist and manipulate hundreds of threads while the Jacquard system controls the pattern, translating a drawn design into cloth. The scale and complexity of the loom stand in contrast to the delicacy of what emerges from it.

The process relies on more than the loom itself. It requires specialist knowledge of thread, tension, pattern and the adjustments needed to produce lace with clarity and precision.

Generations of Knowledge

Coutille’s lace is made in Britain by Cluny Lace Company, an independent family-owned lace maker in Ilkeston.

Cluny has produced traditional Leavers lace since 1845, while the Mason family’s involvement in textiles reaches back to the eighteenth century. Today, the company is owned and managed by the eighth and ninth generations of the family.

That continuity exists in its patterns as well as its people. Cluny holds hundreds of lace designs, including patterns created by earlier generations that remain in production today.

A design can therefore pass through generations while the clothes and lives around it change entirely. This is perhaps what makes living craft so compelling: the knowledge remains, but its expression does not have to stand still.

A Place in Modern Dress

Lace has long carried associations of femininity, intimacy and sensuality. In more recent wardrobes, lingerie has been one of the places where those qualities remained most closely connected to the material.

Yet contemporary clothing is asked to do more. It must move between different settings, feel easy to wear and respond to lives that are rarely organised around a single occasion.

We wanted to retain what makes real lace feel distinctive, the intricacy, tactility and sense of femininity it brings to a garment, without allowing those qualities to make the clothes feel nostalgic or overly precious.

 

One Craft, Two Expressions

The same British-made Leavers lace appears on both the Romy and the Sylvie, yet it takes on a different character through the fabric beside it.

On the Romy, it is paired with 22 momme silk satin. The silk moves fluidly around the body and reflects light through a restrained sheen, while the cotton lace provides a matt and intricate counterpoint. The result feels soft, sensual and effortless.

On the Sylvie, the same lace sits against Italian cotton poplin. The fabric is crisper, more structured and naturally matt. Against it, the lace becomes more graphic, its pattern brought into sharper relief. The craft has not changed. Its expression has.

This is central to Coutille’s understanding of heritage. A material does not need to be worn as it was in the past for the knowledge held within it to remain valuable. Design can preserve the craft while changing its meaning.

Lace Without Nostalgia

The purpose of working with historic craft is not to reproduce history. What matters is retaining the qualities that made the material valuable in the first place: intricacy, skill, tactility, beauty and the knowledge required to transform thread into something that feels almost drawn rather than woven.

For Coutille, choosing Leavers lace was therefore only the beginning. The greater challenge was giving that craftsmanship a place in clothes designed around contemporary life.

The Romy and Sylvie approach the material differently, but share the same intention. Lace is not treated as ornament reserved for a particular occasion, nor as a reference to another era. It becomes part of dresses designed to be lived in, styled differently and returned to repeatedly.

A craft remains relevant when its value can still be felt by the person wearing it. For a craft to remain alive, it must remain part of life.