Lace is a game of peek-a-boo, covering and exposing, full of contradictions. Sew it onto a pair of panties, and it's seductive. Lay it on top of a piano, and it's fussy. In black, it evokes erotica or mourning; in white, wedding gowns. It has decorated bishops' albs and courtesans' frocks. All of this and more is presented at the Cité Internationale de la Dentelle et de la Mode in Calais, a new museum where visitors also learn that this most delicate of fabrics is made on massive iron machines operated by burly men with blackened hands.
    Originally, lace was made by hand-female hands, to be precise. Needle lace goes back to a 15th-century Italian technique called reticella, which involved removing threads from fabric to create a see-through effect. This was the precursor of punto in aria ("stitch in air"), considered the first true lace. Catherine de Medici introduced the fabric to the French, who named it dentelle for the tiny teeth around the edges. About the same time, bobbin lace was developing in Flanders, where women used wood or bone spools to intertwine threads.
    The material was as expensive as gold, and Europe's aristocracy couldn't get enough of it. Originally both sexes (and even children) wore it the same way: as stiff cuffs and the Renaissance ruff, a sort of neck ruffle. They eventually became so large that they prompted comparisons to the platter under John the Baptist's head. (Legend has it that Queen Marguerite de Navarre couldn't reach around her ruff to feed herself, so special eating utensils were made for her.) When long wigs came into vogue, ruffs disappeared, giving way to lace cravats, shirt ruffles and headdresses. Because French dentelle could not compete with superior products from Italy and Flanders, most of the lace worn in France was imported. Louis XIV's finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, propped up the local industry by imposing heavy import taxes, bringing in Venetian lace-makers to train the French and establishing royal workshops in cities such as Alençon and Sedan. Court etiquette made it obligatory for Versailles's nobility to wear this royal lace, called point de France, despite its hefty price tag. When the Revolution broke out, lace abruptly went out of fashion, then came back into style under Napoleon.
    Hand weaving was a slow process for both lace and simpler tulle, which was in great demand as mosquito netting for the colonies. The English, leaders of the Industrial Revolution, sought a machine-made alternative. Various inventors updated the frame for knitting silk and wool stockings devised by William Lee in the 16th century and were able to make open-looped fabrics such as mesh. Then in 1809, John Heathcoat of Nottingham patented a machine using a system of bobbins and chariots, still at the heart of today's technology. Shortly afterward, John Lever created a similar, better functioning loom that became known as the Leavers machine. Both looms made basic tulle netting upon which craftswomen hand-embroidered lace designs.
    The British forbade exportation of the looms under penalty of banishment or death. But French taxes on imported cotton and lace were so high that some risked their lives to set up shop across the Channel. (Luddite attacks on Nottingham factories also encouraged the English to relocate.) In 1816, a certain Robert Webster and a couple of accomplices broke down a wooden loom and hired smugglers to ship the pieces across the narrowest part of the Channel, to Calais, where they started a clandestine workshop in the adjacent town of Saint-Pierre-les-Calais.
    At the time, Calais was a small, relatively unimportant walled city with no textile production to speak of, despite its location in a region where the industry flourished. Napoleon had imposed his Continental Blockade against England, so Calais's port was quiet, though its proximity to Dover made it a favorite site for trafficking. But by the 1820s, trade restrictions were relaxed, and the tulle industry flourished in Calais and Saint-Pierre, which at the time was a rural area with lots of space for new factories.

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