the enduring tradition of embroidery
The one thing that designer Clara Francis would save from her home should she need to (after children, dog and husband, “in that order”) is a table runner she found in her grandmother’s cupboard, after she died. Made in 1906, and filled with embroidered signatures of family and friends, it was one of the few possessions her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, had brought with her from Frankfurt. “I can see the delicate hand-stitching done by her mother, and the love that has been poured into embroidering each name,” Francis says.
The runner, now framed on Francis’s wall, is a message from the past; a beautiful, if bittersweet, love letter to future generations. “It’s a direct link to my ancestry, albeit something that fills me with mixed emotions, because most of those people didn’t survive,” she says.
Embroidery has been used for centuries to send messages: from hidden political or religious motifs and subversive memos to the more usual declarations of love. “There’s a long history of women sending messages through their embroidery, using signs and symbols to communicate when they weren’t allowed to write letters,” says Pragya Agarwal, a data and behavioural scientist and a fellow at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
It’s a rich tradition that has endured. Agarwal points to suffragettes embroidering slogans and symbols on banners and flags (something that was recently echoed by the shirt worn by singer-songwriter Låpsley on a visit to 10 Downing Street, embroidered with the Labour rose on the pocket and “votes for women” on the back). In her book The Subversive Stitch, the late academic Rozsika Parker admires artist Tracey Emin’s “taboo-breaking embroidery” in work such as “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With”, a tent with 102 names appliquéd inside.
Today, embroidery is enjoying a revival thanks to increased demand for personalised products and a reaction to increasing style homogeny. “With the standardisation of everyday clothes, which often have a lack of detail, and [with] everyone wearing the same clothes on the street, personalisation is having a moment,” says Nadia Albertini, an embroidery designer and lecturer who has worked with luxury fashion brands including The Row and Chloé. “It gives you that power to mark your clothes.”
Over the past year, the shirting brand With Nothing Underneath, which has an ongoing collaboration with the embroiderer Cressida Jamieson (as well as an in-store machine-embroidered option), has reported a 93 per cent increase in embroidery in store, and 40 per cent online. “We’re an off-the-rack brand and this really adds the chance to make a shirt feel like a one-off,” says founder Pip Durell. The market is expanding: according to a report by Prophecy Market Insights, the value of the global embroidery market will more than double in the next 10 years, reaching $16.1bn.
Many brands are making inroads into embroidery services. For the past year Francis has been offering them to customers of O Pioneers, the brand she co-owns with Tania Hindmarch. (Actor Helena Bonham Carter recently came into the store to customise some silk knickers.) British knitwear brand Herd is also offering embroidery on selected jumpers and cardigans until Christmas, knit specialist Hades has a personalisation option on its Alphabet scarves, and French high-street brand Sézane offers machine-embroidered words on some of its shirts and sweatshirts.
I too have found myself increasingly drawn to “marking” my clothing. I have a shirt from Parisian brand Sessei emblazoned with my initials at the bottom of my ribs, a hand-knitted Herd cardigan showing my daughters’ initials on the upper arm, and a pencil case for my eldest is decorated with a picture she drew herself, recreated in thread by Jamieson.
But my most elaborate embroidered purchase was from east London brand Thread Maker. Founder Zara Peters’ Keepsake Collection shirts are vintage denim finds, which she embroiders with pictures and messages as a way of “curating your favourite memories”. For example, she has embroidered birthday card greetings written by a client’s late mother. I took little phrases from my daughters’ notebooks, and a few of their drawings to Peters. When I unfolded my new shirt, I cried when I saw their little marks.
Ruth Alice Rands, founder of knitwear label Herd, understands my emotion. “Anything handmade takes intention, time and patience. It roots a thing in a time and place, attaching it to something physical when everything feels so fleeting and transient,” she says.
It’s particularly poignant at this time of year, when consumption is rife and fast-paced. Commissioning someone to sew marks on your clothing adds a layer of permanence. My shirt is not going to end up in the charity shop; it will be passed on to a daughter.
It seems, however, that I’m one of the more self-serving customers. Most people, according to Jamieson, who has worked with brands including Reformation, Réalisation Par, ME+EM and Soho House, request embroidery as a gift. “People love to gift personalised shirts,” notes Durell of With Nothing Underneath. “We see customers coming and ordering 10 shirts, with friends’ initials on each one.”
Jamieson says appetites have grown from simple motifs when she started, to more elaborate messages. Many, she says, are hidden, not intended for eyes other than the wearer and perhaps those closest to them. “I love the thought of a secret message from someone you love, that can be looked at throughout the day as a reminder of them,” she says. “It’s a real message of love.”
Sign up for Fashion Matters, your weekly newsletter with the latest stories in style. Follow @financialtimesfashion on Instagram and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
#enduring #tradition #embroidery
