Tambour embroidery

The origins of tambour embroidery

Although based on the old Indian art of ARI, tambour beading as it is today originates in the French town of Luneville. The town became famous for their embroidery in the late 17th and early 18th century, with hundreds of small ateliers, often ephemeral, setting up to deal with the orders from French and foreign nobility. In French, the technique is called Luneville embroidery. Tambour is French for drum, as the fabric is pulled tightly over a frame.

Empress Josephine revives whitework

Before the French Revolution, the activity had practically disappeared. During a visit to the hot springs in nearby Plombieres, Empress Josephine discovered whitework. She wasted no time taking this fashion back to the court. This led to an explosion in demand and at one time, the region counted thousands of workers, with over 700 situated in Luneville alone. The arrival of tulle fabrics was an incitation to imitate lace with embroidery techniques, first with needles and later with hooks. After a golden age, the exclusively hand-sewn Luneville embroidery found stiff competition from the rapidly growing mechanisation of the mid-19th century.

The arrival of bead embroidery

Beaded embroidery was developed by Louis Ferry-Bonnechaux, an entrepreneur in Luneville, and purely by necessity. Wanting to fight against the mechanisation of the industry and relaunch hand embroidery, he invented this technique in 1865, which consisted of placing beads and sequins and fixing them with a chain stitch. The rise in haute couture corresponds to this period and this luxurious method of embroidery was quickly adopted. It was particularly adapted to the floral motifs of the Art Nouveau period and the fashion of the roaring 20’s.

Tambour embroidery in haute couture

After a slump following the end of the Second World War, many haute couture houses added flamboyant tambour embroidery to their collections. These included Chanel, Dior, Givenchy and Yves Saint-Laurent. At the end of the 1980’s, Saint-Laurent presented his collection of jackets inspired by the irises and sunflowers by Van Gogh, which have become iconic. Each item took over 600 hours to embroider – a mammoth task undertaken by Maison Lesage.
Tambour embroidery has found new enthusiasts in the last few decades among amateur embroiderers, something we have noticed here at Sajou with the numerous clients from all over the world who come to buy our gloving and metallised threads.