Lace entered European dress as a handmade openwork: bobbin lace (threads wound on bobbins, crossed and twisted over a pillow) and needle lace. By the sixteenth century it signalled rank. That history still sits in bridal marketing. It does not describe what a Guangzhou mill ships in 2024.
Yarn before machine
Early lace used linen, then silk and cotton. The yarns were more highly twisted than ordinary weaving yarns, because an open structure shows every irregularity. That requirement never went away. Cheap filament with poor twist shows as a limp, shiny mesh; a decent nylon or polyester lace yarn still needs controlled twist and even dyeing.
Elastane is the twentieth-century change that handmade lace never had. Nylon/elastane and polyester/elastane Raschel made lingerie lace a stretch textile, not a sewn-on ornament.
The industrial break
John Heathcoat’s bobbinet machine (patented 1809) made a regular hexagonal net. John Leavers’s machine, building on Jacquard control, could imitate patterned handmade lace. Nottingham and, later, Calais became machine-lace centres. A Leavers machine is a cathedral of warp beams, carriages and Jacquard cards — tens of thousands of parts — which is why true Leavers remains a specialty cloth.
Warp knitting then took the volume. Multi-bar Raschel machines (Karl Mayer and others) produce galloons and allover laces at apparel speed. Jacquardtronic and Textronic families added a more embroidery-like surface without returning to Leavers economics.
China — with Shantou as a well-known Raschel cluster — now supplies a large share of global fashion lace. That is a mill fact, not a slogan: the machines, the dyehouses and the scallop-cutting sit in one region, which is why sampling from the Pearl River Delta is fast if the construction is named correctly.
What still deserves the old names
- Bobbin and needle lace: conservation, couture ateliers, very small bridal.
- Leavers / Calais-Caudry: heritage bridal and houses that will pay for the cloth.
- Raschel: almost everything else that a brand calls “lace” on a tech pack.
- Chemical lace: motifs that must have no net.
- Imitation lace: weft-knit “lace looks,” laser-cut cloth, printed mesh. Useful, but they are not lace constructions.
If a hangtag says “handmade lace” on a 2,000-piece dress program, ask which machine made the galloon. The answer is almost always Raschel or embroidery. Honesty in the spec sheet protects both the brand and the mill.