What Is Lace?

How is lace made?

Lace is made in one of three ways: stitched with a needle, plaited with bobbins, or produced on a machine. Each method leaves its own structure in the finished cloth, which is why it matters when you judge a piece.

Needle lace

Needle lace, also called needlepoint or point lace, is built up stitch by stitch with a needle and thread, usually in buttonhole stitch. The CAMEO materials database of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, places its first appearance in Italy in the early 16th century and notes that it is still made in Ireland and Belgium.

Bobbin lace

Bobbin lace, also called pillow lace, uses many threads wound on bobbins and held in place with pins; the maker plaits, interlaces, twists or knots them into the pattern. Britannica traces bobbin lace to Flanders and describes it as the more widespread of the two hand crafts.

Machine lace

Machine lace grew out of net-making. According to Nottingham Trent University (NTU), John Heathcoat learned how to make hexagonal net by crossing and twisting threads from his sister-in-law, a bobbin lacemaker, and in 1808 patented a twist-net, or bobbin-net, machine. Earlier knitted net could unravel if snagged; Heathcoat’s twisted net did not.

The Leavers machine followed in 1816, and in 1837 the Jacquard mechanism was added, so the machine itself could make the pattern. Later, warp-knitting machines began to replace the traditional Nottingham machines: NTU describes them as faster, quieter and cleaner, and better suited to synthetic and stretch threads.

Named laces such as Chantilly lace and guipure lace have their own entries.

Where does lace come from?

Lace as a fashion fabric is a European development of the 16th century: Britannica says it did not fully emerge until the Renaissance, the era of Renaissance fashion, and that by 1600 it was a luxury good and an important trade item. Older openwork exists, though; CAMEO records decorative knotted cords found in Peru dating from about 2000 BCE.

The Industrial Revolution changed lace’s place in dress. NTU writes that buyers in Victorian Britain valued machine lace as a new product that more people could afford, and that hand lacemakers, trying to compete, largely lost the market. By 1920, Britannica notes, the lace industry was in decline as lace gradually left men’s and women’s fashion.

What are the properties of lace?

Lace is see-through by design: its pattern is made of thread and open space, so skin or a lining shows through the gaps. How it behaves otherwise depends on its structure and its fibre.

Structure

In a typical piece you can pick out the filling (the dense, patterned areas), the ground (the mesh that holds the motifs together, hexagonal in the bands TRC compares), an outlining thread called the gimp, and an edge that may carry picots, the small loops along the border.

Fibre

Lace is a structure, not a fibre. CAMEO records linen as the most common lace thread in Europe before 1800, with cotton more widespread afterwards; lace has also been made from silk, hair, wool, metal and modern synthetic fibres. Britannica describes early lace as made mostly of linen, and links the 19th-century machine era with cheaper cotton lace.

Stability

Twisted net is more secure than knitted net: NTU notes that the knitted net used for late-1700s embroidered lace could unravel if snagged, which Heathcoat’s twisted net did not. Warp-knitting machines, NTU adds, handle stretch threads better than the older lace machines.

How is lace graded or measured?

None of the sources cited here gives a numerical grade for lace, as momme does for silk or microns for wool. Value comes from how it was made (by hand or machine), what it is made of, and, for machine lace, which machine made it and where.

Machine type is a real difference, not a marketing one. A Leavers dress-lace machine is an industrial giant: NTU says a large one can be 11 metres long, weighing 17 tons and making a web of lace over 4 metres wide. “Nottingham lace” was the trade name for machine lace made across the region, because the wholesale trade was based in Nottingham. As of 2026, NTU counts only three Nottingham lace manufacturers still working.

How does lace appear on a clothing label?

Lace never appears as a fibre name: labels name what the lace is made of, such as cotton, silk or polyester, and decorative lace may not be named at all.

• United States. Under 16 CFR 303.12, decorative trim, including trim applied by embroidery, overlay, appliqué or attachment, is exempt from fibre disclosure if it covers no more than 15 per cent of the item’s surface area. If its fibre is not stated and differs from the main fabric, the label must add “exclusive of decoration”.
• European Union. Regulation (EU) No 1007/2011 requires the fibre content of each component with a different composition (Article 11). A component need not be labelled only if it is not a main lining and makes up less than 30 per cent of the product’s total weight. Separately, visible, isolable, purely decorative fibres that do not exceed 7 per cent of the product’s weight are left out of the fibre calculation (Article 10).

In practice, a dress made mainly of lace will usually have to state the lace’s fibre. A blouse with a lace collar may not: US rules list collars among exempt trimmings.

How do you tell good lace from poor lace?

Look closely at the filling, the outline thread, the edge and the back: these are the places where hand and machine work differ. The Textile Research Centre (TRC) in Leiden compared a handmade and a machine-made lace band side by side and found these differences:

• Filling. In the handmade band the threads are irregular and follow the gimp; in the machine band the filling is looser, with a regular, parallel structure of V-shaped stitches.
• Gimp. The handmade gimp was visible from both sides; the machine gimp only from the front.
• Edge. The handmade edge was worked together with the lace; the machine edge was made separately and added later.
• Ground. The handmade mesh had a twist in its hexagons; one side of each machine mesh was formed by a V-shaped stitch.

Treat these as clues from one documented comparison, not as a universal test. For machine lace, ask what made it: NTU describes Leavers dress-lace machines, patterned by Jacquard since 1837, and newer warp-knitting machines that handle synthetic and stretch threads better.

Red flags: a lace-trimmed garment whose label says “exclusive of decoration” (you will not know the lace’s fibre), and “handmade” claims on lace that shows the regular, parallel filling of a machine.

How do you care for lace?

Care lace according to its fibre and the garment it sits on, so start with the care label.

Is lace sustainable?

Lace has no impact profile of its own, because it is a structure rather than a fibre: a lace’s footprint follows its fibre and how it was made. No lifecycle data for lace as such is published by the bodies cited here. NTU notes that warp-knitted lace from newly developing manufacturing countries soon exceeded European output, so for a new piece the fibre on the label tells you more than the word “lace”.