Many fashions come and go and come back again. Think of shag carpet, big-bell jeans, skirt lengths, tie widths, polka dots, puffy sleeves, collar shapes, and so on. Wait long enough and the pendulum shifts back from fashionable to unfashionable to fashionable again. This is true for interior design, clothing, and even popular music.
Waves come and go and come back again.
One incredible outlier in recorded history is lace, which has the longest historical arch one can imagine, nearly half a millennium from rise to rise before a devastating fall that took place in the decades following the Second World War. Now you hardly ever see it, which is a tragedy to my mind.
The rise of lace traces exactly with the rise of prosperity in the Renaissance. To make it was time-consuming, and the price reflected that. To have it, wear it, and display it in your home was the ultimate ostentation, a display of privilege, wealth, and the capacity of a family to invest in things that exist solely for their beauty and not their function.
Lace became a symbol of an elevated life, one that could take for granted all the basic provisions of life—food, clothing, and shelter—and could deploy resources solely for purposes of beauty alone.
As with all such things from indoor plumbing, electricity, and cell phones, the popularity of lace began in the 16th and 17th centuries as the exclusive province of the well-to-do but royalty in particular. As with many social protocols that still exist, including table manners and decorum in gender relations, it was fully instantiated in the reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King, and the experience of Versailles. It set the standard for Europe and eventually the world.
Lace was central to all fashions at Versailles, and why? Precisely because the gorgeous and labor-intensive fabric had no practical value beyond its capacity to elevate the spirit. There was always a class element here. At one point in history, it set apart the rich from the hoi polloi. Only a small set could possibly own it and maintain it.
It was the ultimate luxury good for centuries. So identified did it become as a ruling-class marker that laws were even enacted to protect it for only certain families and professions. The American colonies were a case in point. Many so-called Sumptuary Laws in New England—inspired by religion in part but also driven by the desire to maintain hierarchies of control—restricted lace only to community leaders like mayors and pastors, while regular people were forbidden to wear it and display it, alongside buckles on shoes and other class indicators.
Sumptuary laws eventually gave way to market economics, which spread financial means ever more widely among all classes in the 17th and 18th centuries. Along with that came gradual industrialization, which reduced the cost of making lace dramatically and thus also reduced its price. Soon everyone could have it, and people were thrilled.
By the end of the 19th century, the typical European, English, and American home was filled with lace. You have to put yourself in the mindset of the times and imagine the ethos surrounding lace. It was once the exclusive province of kings and courtiers. Freedom and democracy worked to bring this thing of ultimate beauty to every home.
American homes of the period had lace everywhere. It was on the table. It was under every lamp. It was on the pillows, the beds, the dresses, and the shirts. The world was decorated with lace, almost as a statement against the class-based social order from whence it came. We reveled in it, collected it, passed it from parents to children, and kept it in the family in ever-growing collections as a symbol of wealth and achievement.
As with all things, from music to fashion to manners to architecture, all of this changed with the Great War. Only a few decades earlier, it seemed as if the trajectory of history was an unchangeable path toward universal peace and prosperity. New inventions were everywhere, slavery was gone, education was nearly universal, and prosperity was spreading to all corners of the earth.
Seemingly out of nowhere, large states stumbled their way into the killing fields with the first total war in history. It was not merely a soldiers’ war of old that the common people could ignore. The Great War conscripted the whole population into the war effort, with rationing, censorship, mass propaganda, and the draft. At the end of it, no one could say for sure what it had truly achieved.
The change in the ethos, however, was dramatic. We saw for the first time that the brutality of the old world, with its senseless death and violence, would not be forever left in the past. Technology that had been a friend to the people turned against the people with bloody new forms of killing, including even the newly invented possibility of flight itself.
It’s hard to put ourselves in the position of understanding what that war did to the human spirit. Nothing would be the same. The music became angry, public theology became tragic, architecture lost its elevation, and the very notion of beautifying the world fell into question. This affected everything including domestic decor, which rallied around new forms of simplicity, minimalism, and a spirit of functionality first.
Lace was among them. It did not disappear entirely from homes. Many middle-class people kept it going, and you know this possibly from family heirlooms of the period.
A few years back, I came across a family that had been broken in many parts due to inheritance disputes, and they were offloading items that had been hoarded for generations dating back to the early 1920s. In five large boxes was the largest single collection of lace I’ve ever seen: tablecloths of every size, runners, doilies, and so much more. The man managing the estate sale frankly told the family that they will pretty much have to give it away because no one really wants this stuff anymore.
The end times for lace came around the 1960s, after the Second World War squeezed whatever idealism remained out of the culture. Brutalism became the norm. Everything gradually stripped down to its essentials. Building became bombable, music became ugly in its highest realms and trivial in its lowest, and clothing became essentially disposable. Everything around us embraced the culture of the gritty, the grim, the transient, the pointless.
The search for meaning found none. This was reflected in everything.
Some people would like to keep it this way. The New York Times a few days ago featured a celebration of new lines of clothing that are aggressively torn, worn, grimey, faded, and horrible. It’s supposed to be some kind of chic homage to the homeless, adopted by the elites. I’m not buying it, and I seriously doubt that it will actually catch on. The very idea of such a line of clothing strikes me as deeply corrupt—the other end of the scale from lace.
There’s the sweep of the fashion for lace, one long arch stretching over 400 years from birth to death. If it does come back—and some people are predicting it given the upheaval of our times—it would be something of a miracle in the history of modern culture. I’m all for it. You can buy the most incredible lace on eBay right now for prices that are utterly amazing, enabling you to live like Louis XIV for less than you will spend at the grocery store this week. That’s beautiful and exciting.
I would like to urge you to do your part. Get some lace. Try it out. Embrace the aspiration. Celebrate the beauty. Consider all the ways in which this fabric emerged as a tribute to human possibility. Be inspired by the hope it represents in the life of the human project. The reclamation of culture and the rejection of despair can begin in your own home or apartment.
