Name: The Last Leavers Lace Factory in Nottingham Is Fighting to Survive
Uploaded: 2024-06-26T04:00:00Z
Duration: 8 min 27 s
Description: Leavers lace is prized by designers as the world’s highest quality machine-made lace. WSJ visited Cluny Lace in England to see the process behind British Leavers lace that could soon disappear. Photo: Ian Snape

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Leavers lace is prized by designers as the world’s highest quality machine-made lace. WSJ visited Cluny Lace in England to see the process behind British Leavers lace that could soon disappear. Photo: Ian Snape Photo: Ian Snape

https://m.wsj.net/video/20240626/d24fea1a-89c2-48ea-a88a-19ea165600b3/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Leavers lace is prized by designers as the world’s highest quality machine-made lace. WSJ visited Cluny Lace in England to see the process behind British Leavers lace that could soon disappear. Photo: Ian Snape

The Last Leavers Lace Factory in Nottingham Is Fighting to Survive

Rory: Lace has always been a way to make a garment feel special.

It was about status and wealth. It was about royalty in the church.

Any high-end fashion house will have used our lace, Christian Dior, Gucci, Burberry.

The peak is we did some lace for the Princess of Wales' wedding dress.

Leavers lace is the closest you can get to the look of handmade lace while still being made on a machine. It's essentially a material that's really couture level, but it's kind of a dying art.

Cluny Lace is the last standing leavers lace factory in England.

That knowledge and those skills are disappearing.

It's quite sad, really, that there's nobody to carry on the tradition. It's been a huge industry in this country, especially in this area.

I do really hope that the designers do think about that really important heritage because once it's gone, it's gone and you'll never get it back again.

People come to buy lace from us because we make some unique styles that no one else really does.

British leavers lace, specifically that made by Cluny these days is more geometric.

Charles: No one else in the world has a range of patterns in the way we do.

Rory: The crazy thing is you can't make new ones.

We can't make any brand new patterns. Those skills have gone. The technical drafts cannot be made anymore.

Ian: The draftsman's made this from the draft come the figure sheets. The figure sheets go to the puncher who then punches the cards, and then the cards go onto the machine, which then produces the lace.

So the pattern for the lace comes from the Jacquard cards. It's basically like an early computer system.

When the cards are on the machine, they are the computer telling the machine what to do. Without the cards, the machines went wrong.

Since the cards are made out of cardboard, they do wear out and that's why you need new cards to be punched. At this point, there's only one guy at Cluny who can do that.

I've been doing this job now for 60 years. I've only got a limited number of years left doing this. I struggle with arthritis and frozen finger. It's a repetitive stress. As I pedal along on this seat like this, my four fingers control keys at the back and my thumb controls three keys at the thumb. I'd put two cards in, number one, number two. The first two numbers on the sheet are 14, 12, so I'm gonna punch 14. I leave out eight, four, and two. And 12, I leave eight and four out. Pedal down, boom. And then I read across pedaling all the way across. When it's completed, it will go to the machine and the twisthands will tie those cards on to form a complete loop.

Now what Cluny has is this incredible archive of thousands of Jacquard cards, which are the DNA of different lace patterns from over 100 years.

Charles: We must have 10,000 different patterns up there in this archive.

I mean, if we had a fire in here and they were all in here, that would be Cluny finished.

When you see the lace on some of the garments, it always stands out. I think it photographs brilliantly. It's really quite three-dimensional in a way.

You've got far more individual threads of yarn working into a smaller area as well, a smaller width, so you're getting a higher density of patenting.

When you're initially threading a leavers lace machine, that can take up to a month. But at every step, you need highly skilled human hands.

It's the style of construction of the lace that we specialize in. It's known as independent beam construction.

Rory: There are over 8,000 beam threads that run vertically, and then over 3,000 bobbins that twist the lace into patterns.

The first step in lacemaking is to fill the empty bobbins with yarn. The bobbins are threaded into the carriages by hand.

We mainly use Egyptian cotton and French nylon.

Amanda: Leavers machines don't really like synthetic fabrics at all, particularly things that stretch are gonna be difficult for leavers machines to deal with.

One of the most important things with lace is that it's uniform. So with a leavers lace machine, a human has to come in and fine tune and check every single one of the bobbins to make sure there's no stray threads, no bumps, nothing that's out of the ordinary.

A slack bobbin would make a very obvious mistake and that would make the lace useless. When the bobbins are done, we put them into the machine, 3,360 of them to make the pattern, which we make about 50 yards of lace. The machine can only run at a certain speed, no faster. The best we can make is something like 40 or 50 meters in a week.

It's not super fast by our sort of digital sense of super fast. It's like walking back in time.

Ian: The noise can be hypnotic. You kind of zone out just to the regular rhythmic clunk and bump of the machine.

Charles: All the machines are extremely old and wearing out, and there's no new machine really being built since 1960. There aren't very many people who can repair the machines at all.

It is a completely niche product. The lace is made by twisting the threads together. If you cut our lace, it will only ever go to the next knot. It won't fall apart, whereas other styles with lace made on different machines, if you cut them, they literally fall to pieces. Our style of lace is the best of the best.

Charles: The trouble with lace is it's an unstable fabric. It's based on holes.

What that means with leavers lace is that humans need to come in and fine tune and check every inch of the lace. Cluny's lace costs about 40 to $50 a yard. Mass-produced lace can be as low as $3 a yard. These days, leavers lace is extremely rare. There's less and less and less of a demand for it in today's fashion industry.

Cluny are reliant on very much designer brands picking up their fabrics and using them for a new seasons collection.

There are contemporary designers that kind of rethink lace. So it does have a place in contemporary fashion, but there's something increasingly kind of archival and vintage feeling about it because it is a dying art.

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were about 40,000 people working in Nottingham on lacemaking, and today there's probably less than 100 people.

Over the years, I have tried to train people to do the job, and I've failed quite miserably. It's a dirty job. I mean, look at me, I'm grubby. The black led, the graphite gets all over you, you know.

In a way it's nice to be the last one's left. It's also quite lonely.

The state of the leavers lace market around the world is in total decline unfortunately. There's so many problems facing it from spare parts to skill shortages to everything in the production chain really. It's a problem and an issue really. And I'm not sure the modern world wants leavers lace.

Maybe one day it'll only be in museums. It makes me very sad that it's going the way it does, you know? It makes me very sad.