A little history...
Strawberries, jabots, headdresses, wedding dresses and veils… in the 17th century, all the nobility and high clergy were adorned with Venetian stitch lace, which was very fashionable at the time. But in 1650, Marthe La Perrière, a lace-maker from Alençon, wanted to perfect this delicate art and encouraged her young apprentices to create their own technique. They gradually invented Alençon stitch lace, an extremely fine needle lace offering a unique and rare quality.
In 1665, Colbert, Louis XIV’s finance minister, decided to set up a royal factory in Alençon and made this stitch, unanimously appreciated, a benchmark in the field in order to ban all imports of foreign lace.
This production employed nearly 10,000 people in the first half of the 18th century, and during the first Universal Exhibition in London in 1851, Alençon lace was recognised as “the lace of Queens and Queen of laces”.
