Dessiner La Dentelle (Drawing Lace) The Museum for Lace and Fashion/ Cité Internationale de la Dentelle et de la Mode de Calais

The Museum for Lace and Fashion conserves over 10,000 sketches (industrial drawings applied to the field of mechanical lace), some of which were ultimately turned into lace.  

For the first time, over one hundred of them have been put on show to illustrate the creativity in Calais from the nineteenth century up to the 1950s. They are abundantly supplemented by private archives and loans from present-day manufactures for the recent and contemporary period. The exhibition traces how the occupation of lace sketcher developed from the nineteenth century up to the present day. It explains in particular how lace patterns are executed, from initial idea to final material rendition, through the example of Henry Ball, a remarkable sketcher in 1920s Calais. Shining the spotlight on today’s sketchers, the exhibition also looks at the contribution of digital technologies.