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Genevieve

Digital Print

70 x 70 cm

Museum Collection

Geneviève is a young lacemaker from the Valenciennes region of France. Born in the mid-eighteenth century into an impoverished family, she was sent at the age of seven to a charitable religious institution to learn how to make bobbin lace. Under constant supervision in a highly regulated environment, Geneviève learned lacemaking techniques alongside other girls, eventually becoming proficient enough to gain a place at a lace workhouse. Here, she makes a modest, although unreliable, income working long hours under harsh conditions. Lacemaking, one of the few trades available to women in the eighteenth century, enables Geneviève to avoid abject poverty. Her hard-won skill also widens the range of options available to her. With the measure of financial independence lacemaking offers, Geneviève can choose whether to marry and perhaps have children, or to ascend to the ranks of her industry as a teacher. Either way, her early education at the lace school has improved her life.

Threads of Power

Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen

Two contrasting perspectives inform this exhibition’s title. In the first, lace is an exalted handmade commodity signifying the wealth, taste, and prestige of its wearers—men and women at the pinnacle of the European social hierarchy from the sixteenth century onward. In the second, lace shows us the unequal balance of power between those who design, sell, and wear lace and the lacemakers themselves. Surviving examples of costly handmade lace thus enable us to envision the material worlds of the powerful, as well as connect us to the lives of the highly skilled, poorly paid lacemaking women whose names are no longer known to us. Crafted from expensive materials like linen and silk thread, and incorporating many hours of painstaking labor, early lace proved so inherently valuable that it was passed down through generations and modified when fashions changed. Since the mid-nineteenth century, antique lace patterns have been faithfully copied using machine technologies. The threads of lace thus link past and present and trace a network that runs through cities, nations, empires, and continents. Throughout the five centuries since its inception, despite transformations in use, form, fashion, and manufacture, lace has persisted as a global textile. St. Gallen, located in eastern Switzerland, has been an important center of textile production since the fifteenth century. The city is home to the Textilmuseum St. Gallen, established in 1878, which houses an extensive collection of historical lace, thanks in large part to early twentieth-century donations from Leopold Iklé (1838–1922), a local textile manufacturer. Drawing on this rich repository, Threads of Power traces the history of European lace in fashion from its sixteenth-century origins to today.

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