A lace show in Hangzhou wants to change what you think lace is

"It's just a trim, but there's no limit to what you can put it on."

The lace we talk about today is a kind of openwork embroidery that appeared after the Renaissance. In the age of handwork, people used bobbins and needles to make narrow strips of it and sewed them onto clothes as decoration. But the work was intricate and slow, and lace stayed a luxury only the privileged few — clergy, princes and nobles — could afford to wear.

In 1828, the first hand-operated embroidery machine was built in St. Gallen, in eastern Switzerland. In 1869, after several rounds of improvement, the Swiss embroidery machine maker Saurer (founded by Franz Saurer) launched a steam-powered embroidery machine and made mass production possible. Only then did a real market for lace open up.

What happened next is the story Mary Ma, founder of Fabric Library, wants to tell.

From April 22 to June 22, Fabric Library staged “Lace to Meet You,” a Chinese-Swiss crossover art exhibition about lace. The materials design and research center was founded in 2016, and in under two years it had already put on fabric-centered shows such as “1-20 Project” and “20-1 Station.”

But this was the first time it had pulled a single material craft out and given it a show of its own.

As Mary sees it, most of the lace we come across today is French or Italian, and it leaves the same impression every time: delicate, luxurious, romantic, retro, even feminine. That is not the only form lace can take. In its early days, in fact, lace was a marker of religion, politics and rank, and had nothing to do with women.

"It was only after I went to the Textile Museum of St. Gallen in the winter of 2015 that my whole idea of lace fell apart. That visit was an accident — my trip was to study at Jakob Schlaepfer AG, a fabric research center in St. Gallen. Once they heard I ran Fabric Library, they told me to go see the textile museum. I got there at eight at night, long after closing time, but the director was still waiting for me. He walked me through floor by floor, turning on the lights to show me what they had. It was overwhelming, especially with no one else in the whole museum but me."

Rooted in Switzerland's textile tradition, the Textile Museum of St. Gallen opened in 1878 and now holds more than 40,000 objects, covering machine embroidery, hand embroidery, lace, textile patterns, printed materials and other textile techniques. It is also the most important textile collection in Switzerland.

What struck Mary most was a small library tucked away inside the museum. Working along a timeline, the staff keep and record the classic textile samples of each era in bound volumes. The reason they survive in such good condition is that the library never opens to the public.

One of those volumes, charting how textile craft developed after World War II, is in this exhibition — Mary brought it back from St. Gallen herself.

What won Mary over about St. Gallen lace was its plainness. "That is the style St. Gallen developed for itself back in the handicraft era. They put lace on cotton, silk and linen — cloth that is plain to begin with. After the machine arrived, all St. Gallen exported was the technology. In France, Italy and Belgium at the same time, lace went the other way, toward the exquisite and the lavish," Mary said in an interview with QDaily.

After that trip she went back to the Textile Museum of St. Gallen several more times, until she talked the museum into letting her bring part of the collection to China to show.

Beyond her own taste, this suits what Fabric Library is for. "We want to put every material back in a low, close-to-the-source state. We're here to serve fashion designers, fabric merchants, materials researchers, people like that."

The exhibition starts from St. Gallen lace, but Mary stressed that she had no intention of copying the textile museum's way of curating — laying out the history of lace strictly by date or by style. "I want to do something fun, something people want to take part in." Unlike museums, research institutes and other specialist bodies, Fabric Library puts its weight on new attempts and new ideas. The way Mary sees it, the two kinds of work give an audience, and a city, things that complete each other.

More than that, she hopes visitors treat “Lace to Meet You” as a starting point. "If you make things, I hope this sets you off, rather than leaving you to admire how exquisite it is. That's only the surface." So she chose to read lace the way a maker would.

In the "Lace Forest" section, Fabric Library built an immersive space for meditation. With projections and installations, they set lace against light and music to conjure up a strange forest — which points back to where lace comes from: flowers, plants, woods, light falling through leaves. All of it fed the first lace patterns anyone made.

In the "Diverse Inspirations" section are paintings, illustrations and even film costumes from the early 20th century, all steeped in the vogue for the Orient.

One is Flowering Plum Orchard (after Hiroshige), painted by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh in 1887, which took its cue from the ukiyo-e master Utagawa Hiroshige. Another is a set of illustrations the Danish artist Kay Nielsen made for the tales of One Thousand and One Nights, thick with Eastern atmosphere. "The fashion of that era was to study foreign cultures. This section is meant to show how the designers of the day thought and invented. Why did they make work with that kind of spirit? You have to look at it against its own history. I think it can jolt people today: what you do is not copy it, but bring the craft back to life and make designs that feel contemporary."

Because lace carries religious meaning, "White Faith" was built as a plain, solemn room. It displays the robes clergy wore for ceremonies, along with prayer cards, and you can pick out the fine, elegant lace patterns on them.

Against it sits the far brighter "Postwar Colors" section. After World War II, as economies recovered and living standards rose, lace products and the appetite to design them took off again. In 1947, Dior showed the New Look in Paris and set the terms of postwar fashion. In the 1960s, with youth culture on the rise, lace fabrics and patterns turned younger and more colorful. In this section you can see printed matte sequined lace with a personal stamp on it, and sequined mesh in bright color combinations. Lace also stopped being confined to clothing and other traditional textiles, and turned up on hats, shoes and furniture.

By then it had broken well past our narrow idea of what lace is. "At that point the concept had already stretched. A piece of openwork cloth with repeating links and a play of solid against void — that is already lace," Mary explained.

She did not curate in the traditional way, but she is clear about what she wants visitors to take away. "The pieces from the St. Gallen museum stand for lace's past. What lace is now, and what it will be, is the part I care about more."

"St. Gallen's lace craft flourished because machines and technology developed." That belief shaped the curatorial language of Lace to Meet You. "Right now everyone says handwork is beautiful, sentiment is precious, natural cloth beats synthetics. That's all wishful thinking. You have to put everything on an equal footing. Handwork laid the whole foundation of the lace craft, but in that era, demand for it could only be a small pleasure of daily life. It couldn't spread. As technology advanced and the market grew, new techniques were bound to appear. What you have to do is start from people and create the material from there."

In the era of the first-generation two-head embroidery machines, machines were still copying the movements of the human hand. In the "Beauty of the Machine" section you can see a handkerchief embroidered with a pony, and another showing a swan from the reverse; it is hard to tell either from hand embroidery.

Then machines began to break past the limits of the body and follow a logic of their own. Besides working faster, they could produce patterns that were hard to make by hand. On the first-generation machines, embroidery still had to be worked on a backing cloth. With the second-generation shuttle embroidery machine, lace with a mesh structure began to appear. In 1883, St. Gallen combined embroidery with chemical solvents and invented "etched lace" — the form of lace we know best today. The third-generation punched-card jacquard embroidery machine was what made that etched lace trim possible: it needed no backing at all and still held together in a firm bonded structure.

St. Gallen lace keeps pushing toward high technology. The "Lace Reborn" section shows a 3D-printed lace collar Mary brought back from Switzerland — designer Martin Leuthold developed an entirely new lace fabric out of silicone alone.

From here, even the idea of "material" widens.

In the "Lace Forest" section, Mary and her team built an interactive installation. They laid salt and alum on the surface of lace and let solid crystals form. Tap the installation's lamp lightly and different lace ground patterns come up.

"Lace patterns are actually a lot like crystals. I wanted an experience like this to connect lace with ordinary people, and to push past the limits of what lace can look like," Mary said when we asked where the idea came from.

There is more like it through the show. In the "Hands-On" area you can pull a piece from a waterfall of lace and take it apart, to feel how bobbin lace is plaited; in the "Stamp Collection" section you can pick up a magnifying glass and study the fine grain of the patterns.

It has worked. "The exhibition introduced us to all sorts of people. What moved me most was an 81-year-old who came dressed head to toe in lace. And plenty of people wanted to donate their own collections for me to show. I never expected that," Mary told us.

What shape will lace take in the future? That is the question the "Lace Future" section asks. Fabric Library gave the designers it works with a set of new lace fabrics and helped them turn out clothes in very different styles. You have to lean in close to catch the trick.

The designer CHEN PENG, for one, used film-laminated lace and nylon to make three outsized down jackets; there are also lace umbrellas and lace rain capes, which nobody expects. "A lot of people think lace is full of holes, so how could it keep out rain, wind or cold? Well, we'll show you. Lace has already got there."

After 21 years around fabric, Mary finds that "most people treat textiles as nothing more than supply." In fact textiles cover an enormous range; no one has dug out what makes them appealing. She founded Fabric Library to talk directly to independent designers and to the people inside clothing brands who really get to choose, and to say something different about materials.

The main problem to solve is how to build a healthy cycle among materials researchers, brands and consumers.

"What a brand has to ask is: if I buy your fabric, can I sell the clothes? And Fabric Library has no sales staff at all. So I answer your doubts with an exhibition. Lace to Meet You ended up as one large community. We ran a satellite venue at the Kerry Centre, and at the same time an online Lace Festival on Tmall. The main venue had a linked product release too. What that added up to was a lace craze, and consumers were happy to buy plenty of lace during it. In the end the ones who really gained were the merchants."

The Kerry Centre has now signed a strategic partnership with Fabric Library. Fabric Library will bring in brands no one else in Hangzhou has and stage interactive shows, which helps bring the property to life; in return, the Kerry Centre will help Fabric Library incubate more content.

As for what comes next, Mary won't set a frame around theme or format. "We're planning a materials photography show, and one on materials and psychology. I just want to use cloth to help people make all sorts of things."

Cover image, banner and in-text images: Fabric Library.