Every year, the Mulhouse Christmas market is adorned with dazzling colors. But the palette is no coincidence: it is inspired by a fabric that sets the tone, created especially for each edition. And in 2024, to celebrate the city's 800th anniversary, Mulhouse did not fail in this tradition, and even surpassed itself.
Since September, and for one year, the city of Mulhouse is celebrating 800 years since the construction of the ramparts which mark the beginnings of its current structure.
A way to celebrate with great pomp the birthday of the woman who made Alsace shine with her multiple know-how in the field of industry, more precisely in that of textiles.
Indeed, textiles are part of the DNA of Mulhouse. This is why the city has chosen to design, for each Christmas market since 1998, a unique and exclusive fabric, which dresses the city and the tree during the end-of-year holidays.
A tribute to its fashion designers, weavers and all the people who gave their energy to highlight Mulhouse thread and textiles, renowned today for being among the best in the world.
A symbolic fabric to celebrate, each year, the industrial past of Mulhouse
To celebrate 800 years of Mulhouse and its industrial reputation, we find on this year's fabric architectural motifs of pale beige stone ornaments and grisaille stained glass windows. Two elements present on certain buildings in the city dating between 1290 and 1310, and echoing the medieval era.
At the bottom of the fabric, we can observe the motif of an old Bugattia nod to the auto museum which houses the rich Schlumpf collection, the largest in the world. There is also a steam locomotive, which recalls the Train Citythe great railway museum of Mulhouse.
The ornaments are rich, and give a lot of texture to the fabric, reminiscent of the movement of the plumes of smoke escaping from the chimneys, at the time when the Mulhouse factories were operating at full capacity.
The motif of the eight-armed cogwheel also recurs regularly: it is the city's coat of arms. This cog, which propelled Mulhouse into the ferment of the Industrial Revolution, was used in various industrial trades: on the railways, in the automobile industry, and of course in the textile industry.
The flowers were imagined from two samples of Indian fabrics carefully kept at the Museum of Printing on Fabrics (MISE). Indienne is a painted or printed fabric, imported from Indian counters, which quickly caught the eye of Mulhouse industrialists, and enjoyed great success in Europe. The floral motifs found there are often fictitious, and are mainly intended to be decorative, before being realistic.
Marie-Jo Gebel, the artist at the helm
It was the seamstress Marie-Jo Gebel who made the 2024 fabric, which decorates the entire city of Mulhouse during the Christmas market (which runs until December 27 in the center). An exercise that she knows well, since it was she who made the first creation which would launch the tradition of Christmas fabric in 1998.
She has made them for around twenty years. This multidisciplinary artist has been passionate about sewing since the age of nine, surrounded and guided by the learned advice of her grandmothers. After spreading her know-how across the world, notably in Mykonos, Beijing and New York, Marie-Jo Gebel returned to her first love: Mulhouse textiles. Selected from 13 candidates, it pays homage to the city and its industrial past, in a warm and sparkling creation.
Even though the patterns and colors change every year, the collections are always inspired by documents from MISE, the largest textile collection in the world. This year, Marie-Jo Gebel drew her inspiration from two documents from the Mieg & Cie collection.
In the end, no less than 11 kilometers of fabric were delivered this year, to decorate the Christmas marketthe 12 meter high fir tree Place des Victoires, but also to be sold retail at the Boutique aux Etoffes in the city center or on the online store, at the price of 19.50 euros per meter.
