The comeback of embroidery

IThere was a time when embroidery was considered a hobby reserved for women. Often used in the context of education – a girl from a good family had to know how to use a needle – it was also the guarantor of a certain virtue. Entrusting women with tasks (embroidery, sewing, etc.) to be carried out in the privacy of their homes not only made it possible to guarantee social order, where each sex is in its rightful place, but above all to prevent them from expressing any thoughts. likely to cause them to deviate from their role as wife and mother.

It is because they refuse to be reduced to their feminine condition and confined to the domestic space that the women’s liberation movements took hold, in the 20th century.^e century, embroidery. In their wake, women artists, from Louise Bourgeois to Judy Chicago and Annette Messager, are turning this outdated activity into a tool for advocacy.

“They practice what’historian of the’art Aline Dallier names the’anti-embroidery, the technique no longer being a tool of’patriarchal enslavement but the choice of resistance”, notes art critic and exhibition curator Julie Crenn in the text “To the thread and the needle, a short history of contemporary embroidery” (2020). Shaking up a very masculine system is what motivated Natalie Portman who, for the 2020 Oscars, had her Dior cape embroidered with the names of around ten female filmmakers, shunned that year by the industry cinema.

“Satisfy vanity”

In the history of fashion, embroidery as an ornament has always shone – and made those who wore it shine – going so far as to reach the precious status of a craft. “Embroidery owes its origin to man’s natural need to enhance himself in the minds of his fellow men or to satisfy vanity with luxury ornaments, then to the need to establish social distinctions among populations,” notes the historian Louis de Farcy in The Embroidery of the XI^e century to the present (1890).

This age-old art, which has its origins in the Orient, adorns coats of arms, banners, liturgical vestments and other refined toiletries. Exuberant as possible, the 1920s marked the golden age of this exercise, sublimated by couturiers who then imagined dresses, coats, tunics and other beaded handbags. In the ornamentation department, the elegant have the choice: gold, fur, pearls, mother-of-pearl, precious stones or even beetle wings, whose metallic green offers many reflections. Even today, it is good to shine and stand out in society that we wear embroidered clothing.