Letter from Paris: The Made in France Exhibition

Dear friends,

It’s been a good season for exhibitions around here. I’ve been twice to see the blockbuster, the surprise smash hit that was Caillebotte: Peindre les hommes (Caillebotte: Painting Men) at the Musée d’Orsay. Tickets sold out months ahead of the end of the run, which nobody saw coming. Not even me, and I have always loved Caillebotte more than any other Impressionist.

The show was full of delicious details of late-nineteenth-century textile and costume, including these high-crowned boating hats (note the ribbons to adjust the fit) that feature in many of his paintings of male rowers. I am obsessed and I want one.

Gustave Caillebotte, Canotiers (detail), 1877. Oil on canvas, private collection.

Unfortunately, the show was also full of people.

I don’t mean the people in the paintings, I mean le tout Paris and their out-of-town friends and relations, plus piles and piles of people from elsewhere who had got word that if you were coming to town, this was the thing you needed to see.

In spite of timed entry, in spite of going first thing in the morning during members’ hours, the atmosphere in the galleries was, shall we say, less than serene.

On the one hand, it’s pretty cool to live in a town where art exhibitions are more popular than football. On the other hand, I’d rather not have museumgoing be a contact sport.

Meanwhile, the Musée des Archives Nationales (the museum of the French National Archives) was offering something much smaller and far quieter, but even more packed with choice morsels for yarn and fabric nerds like you and me. This was Made in France: Une histoire du textile (Made in France: A History of the Textile).

If that museum sounds familiar, maybe you remember my visit to their exhibition about the history of the Rambouillet Merino, the one where Clara Parkes almost got us kicked out because she cannot be trusted around taxidermied sheep.

That was a while ago and I recently changed my facial hair, so I decided I could probably slip past the security guards and look around.

Made in France was a small show: just one medium-large gallery with a tiny blip of a second gallery attached at the tail end. Still, it packed a wallop.

The goal wasn’t to tell the entire history of textile-making in France. It started with the late seventeenth century, when French consumers were increasingly drawn to cloth imported from India and China. As a result, the nation’s own textile manufacturing began to suffer.

Enter Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Comptroller-General of Finances under Louis XIV, who decided the best plan of action was twofold: first, tax the heck out of those foreign fabrics; second, establish a national system of standards and inspections for France’s own textile industry. Lower the level of competition, raise the level of quality. Such was the idea, and it worked—for a time.

Linen from Vimoutiers and Lisieux bearing government inspection and makers’ stamps, 1782.

From there, the exhibition traced the rise, and fall, and rise, and fall of the manufacture of fabric in France, ending on a sombre note with the shuttering of most of the spinning and weaving mills by the end of the 1990s.

As the subject is fabric, of course the mix of artifacts on display included hundreds of intriguing swatches. Here are a few of my favorites.

Painted Cotton

These swatches of “toile peintes” (painted cotton) from Amiens were collected by an inspector in 1763 as part of a report on the state of textile manufacturing in the region. The designs are clearly inspired by the Indian block-printed cottons that had kicked off Colbert’s reforms–and that are still produced today. The inspector noted that the factory’s staff of 56 included 20 pinceauteurs, brush-workers, who added the color to the printed cloth.

Toile de Jouy

One of the most famous fabrics ever produced in France (it has its own museum) is the scenic single-color printed cotton called toile de Jouy. It was developed in the town of Jouy-en-Josas, at the factory of Christophe-Phillipe Oberkampf. The most famous varieties were (and are) decorated with romanticized rural or antique scenes populated by shepherds and picturesque ruins.

In 1783, when his firm received the coveted title of manufacture royale (royal maker), Oberkampf ordered a celebratory design showing in splendid detail the various stages in the making of toile de Jouy–all of them taking place outdoors in an arcadian landscape.

Printing a length of Toile de Jouy, including Oberkampf’s new royal warrant.

Adding painted details to a length of printed fabric.

Rejected Socks

In the 1780s, the proprietors of a stocking-knitting company in Saint-Amand petitioned the regional government for permission to have their spinning and knitting done outside of France. They sent along this charming pair of child’s wool stockings to demonstrate the quality that could be obtained for a low price. The government said no.

Cute, but no.

The Knitted Silk of the Widow Pallouis

This beautiful strip of knitted floral fabric is made from soie galette, bourette silk. The process uses cocoon waste to produce a thread cheaper than pure silk but more elegant than cotton, and was adapted from a Swiss process by the inventor and entrepreneur Marie Gagnière, the Widow (Veuve) Pallouis. She submitted this and other samples to the government in 1778, seeking to secure her inventor’s rights.

Sprucing Up Versailles

The French Revolution of 1789 decimated the French silk industry. As Emperor, Napoléon I sought to bring it back to life with imperial patronage, including rolls of this multi-colored silk brocade (ordered in 1811) intended for the renovation of the empress’ bedroom at Versailles.

Big in Batavia

As part of an 1845 mission to increase exports of French fabric to Asia, a government agent visiting the market in Batavia (present-day Jakarta, Indonesia) gathered these silk samples as an indication of local tastes. They come from India, China, Japan, and … France.

Arsenic and Old Lace but Especially Arsenic

The exciting emergence of synthetic dyes was represented by a silk day dress, made in Paris in the 1860s, with exquisite details including lace cuffs and passementerie buttons decorated with fine thread work.

This particular green (now greatly dulled by time and oxidation) was created with a dye that included copper and arsenic. So much arsenic, in fact, that the dress may still be poisonous even to casual observers, and was therefore thoughtfully displayed in a hermetically sealed glass case.

Wartime Experiments

The severe shortages caused by World War II led to nationwide drives to recycle and reuse old fabrics, and there were also experiments in using non-traditional fibers as well. The upholstery samples from the 1940s were woven from a filament derived from genêt (broom).

And Then …

Inevitably, after three centuries of eye candy came the arrival of post-war synthetics.

Now, I listened to my grandmother and her friends talk about the horrors of laundry day in the 1920s and 1930s. I understand completely why the words “drip dry” and “no-iron” could bring joy to the hearts of those who had spent their entire lives dreading Monday and Tuesday.

And yet.

I cannot stand polyester. I am a child of the seventies. I went to school stuffed into rip-resistant pants with a crease sewn down the front, and to church in wrinkle-free dress shirts that could stand up on their own. I remember the truly astonishing aroma of double-knits drenched in sweat and cigarette smoke. I can still feel the rug burns from shag carpet and Herculon upholstery.

So I shuddered in front of this poster from the textile organization Flésa.

“The right fabric,” it says, “isn’t chosen by chance.” It goes on to tout the value of the “Flésa” label, which not only guaranteed quality–but also told you through a system of color-coding how the fabric was to be laundered.

It was here that Made in France brought up a point I’d never considered before. Until polyester, nylon, and their kin came to market, a person with basic life skills could tell by feel what sort of fabric they were touching, and know how to care for it.

Now, it wasn’t so simple. This, the exhibition noted, is when the first garment care labels were created. Because without those labels, you no longer had any way of knowing for sure what might be in your skirt or shirt or coat or even your underwear.

That knowledge seems in hindsight like a sad thing to have given up, even if it did mean (and this is no small thing) that my grandmother got a little more rest on Mondays and Tuesdays.

I realized, in that moment, that one reason I love knitting my own socks and sweaters and whatnot is that I can know more about where they come from and what they’re made of.

I’m glad I’m not alone in that. There’s been a considerable increase in the number of yarn manufacturers who not only tell you what fibers they’re using, but where and how those fibers were raised and processed. That’s happening because more and more of us demand to know.

In a world where we are constantly bombarded with information from everywhere, yet seem to know less and less about what’s right next to us, that seems like a step in the right direction.

Cordialement,

Franklin