Chapter 16 #2
Silk—la soie in French—in its many variants is perhaps the raw material par excellence of the high fashion industry.
When Alice was in Paris, observing the fashion world from her own particular perspective, silk was still very much the go-to fabric for nearly all high fashion evening wear and lingerie.
It came in so many different types: the airiness of organza and chiffon, the liquid sheen of the satins, the shapeliness of silk jersey and the creamy crispness of crepe de chine, and so many more.
Alice writes in her notebook about secretly going into the silk room at Tissus Tellier with Mariette and being overwhelmed by the sheer beauty around her.
It was like being enveloped in layers of light, she wrote.
Light from Lyon, because it was there that most of the silks had been made.
The ancient guild of silk weavers and manufacturers of Lyon, known as La Fabrique, The Manufacture, began in 1536, under the patronage of the great King Francois I, and soon grew to cover every aspect of the silk trade, from production to sales, nationally and internationally.
Throughout history, the merchants of La Fabrique, known as les soyeux, the ‘silkys’ or ‘silken ones’, and their workers, the weavers known as ‘canuts’, have innovated by creating new variants of silk fabric, as well as adding embellishments, such as embroidery, brocading, and so on.
Despite various reverses at different tumultuous periods, such as the Wars of Religion, the Revolution and the First World War, the Lyon industry, supported by the patronage of kings and emperors, continued to flourish, supplying luxurious fabrics for the creation of high-end clothing and home decoration.
And not only in France, either—in the booming nineteenth century, Lyon silks became the highest-earning French export to the world, and Lyon merchants invested in silk-thread factories in Asia and the Middle East. Silk, however, was an expensive fabric, and in the twentieth century, competition from synthetic fabrics such as rayon (sometimes known as ‘artificial silk’) and later, nylon, grew apace, as did the demand for fashionable clothes for less wealthy people.
The soyeux of Lyon continued to innovate, attempting to move with the times, and supplied fabric not only for the great couture houses, but also for creators working for upmarket department stores.
But the crash of 1929 and its aftermath caused a huge blow to the Lyon silk industry, with production falling by more than three-quarters, and many of the smaller silk houses disappearing almost overnight.
The advent of the Second World War finished off many others.
Later, there was a small recovery, and today there are still highly respected soyeux in Lyon, where great craftspeople create the exclusive fabrics for Hermès’s famous printed silk scarves, for example, as well as supplying others, such as Chanel and Dior, while smaller enterprises have revived the art of silk production for a wider market.
Both strong and soft, silk is a beautiful material to work with as well as to wear, and it’s not surprising that in one of her rare surviving interviews, Elisabeth Fontaine says that the very first time she touched a piece of silk was also the moment when she fell irrevocably in love with a material that was to obsess her, and to feature so strongly in her first collection.
That initial spark was ignited in Lyon when she was eleven years old, and her mother, who had some skill as an embroiderer, decided to try her luck doing piecework for one of the silk houses there.
Through a connection, she acquired four small silk offcuts to embroider as samples, but before she could apply needle to fabric, her daughter, enamoured by the feel and look of the material, took one of the samples and hid it.
Her mother looked high and low for it, but in vain.
She suspected her daughter, but despite a severe interrogation, the child held firm in her denials.
And for months afterwards that piece of silk satin stayed concealed, a beloved guilty secret, in a tiny hole the little girl had made in her mattress.
Until the day when her mother spotted it while turning over the mattress, and little Elisabeth was in all kinds of trouble.
But, the designer tells the interviewer, she had no regrets.
And her mother hadn’t suffered from her action, as one of her remaining samples attracted the attention not of a Lyon silk dealer, but of a society dressmaker in Biarritz, which later proved life-saving after her mother had to fend for them both on her own.
It’s likely Alice read that interview, though she doesn’t mention it in her notebook.
If she did read it, she might have been reminded of her own childhood, wistfully eyeing the offcuts of beautiful silk ribbons and fine lace that her mother expressly forbade her to take, for even the smallest scraps might be repurposed into a tiny flower as part of an embellishment for a hat.
These materials were expensive, and thrifty Eugénie was not one to waste anything.
But Alice also writes in her notebook that after that secret excursion into the fabric shop silk room, she said to Mariette that she wished that instead of working in fashion illustration, she had got a job like her friend’s, in a fabric shop where you might have an opportunity to handle silks all day long.
She notes wryly that Mariette had scoffed at this and said that she was much too junior for that.
Her sister Annie, though, being second in command at the store, did have that privilege, and indeed she had become quite the specialist, having been sent several times to Lyon to inspect new patterns of silk fabric that might attract the interest of the couture houses whom they supplied, like Elisabeth Fontaine’s.