No national costume, a mosaic of pays
France has no national costume, and that is almost logical. Too large, too varied, industrialised and centralised early, it let the fashion of Paris swallow its regional dress before many others. From the mid-nineteenth century, regional costume receded everywhere, faster than in Brittany or the Alps.
What remained was a mosaic: each pays, sometimes each canton, had its cut, its colours and above all its coiffe. From Normandy to Gascony, from Berry to Provence, people did not dress the same fifty kilometres apart.
So rather than a single dress, France left a collection of signs. The lace coiffe, the printed neckerchief, the clog, the work smock. Pieces more than an ensemble, but pieces that say a great deal.
The printed South: the indiennes
If one colour is to be remembered from southern France, it is that of the indiennes. These flower-printed cottons, arrived from India through the port of Marseille in the seventeenth century, were an immediate hit: light, washable, cheerful, all that wool and linen were not.
They were so successful that the kingdom banned them for more than seventy years, to protect wool and silk. People went on wearing them illegally, until Marseille and Jouy began to print them themselves. The “Provençal” flowers we think immemorial come from there.
Neckerchiefs, petticoats, linings, quilts: the indienne coloured the whole Midi. Look at the pink bodice and the blue flowered jacket of the young Arlésienne on the cover; that is already indienne, worn with an everyday elegance.
The Arlésienne, a codified elegance
There is one exception to this general retreat, and it is Arles. There, the women's costume did not die out: it settled. A ribbon coiffe drawn tight over a high chignon, a lace fichu crossed on the chest, the famous “chapelle”, an upright, proud silhouette everyone recognises.
It is no accident. At the end of the nineteenth century, the poet Frédéric Mistral put his Nobel prize into a museum, the Museon Arlaten, to save this costume and this culture. The rules were codified, the wearing of the coiffe set by age, and the costume crossed the twentieth century alive.
Even today, a Queen of Arles is elected, and hundreds of women wear the costume on feast days. It is the rare example of a tradition that people chose, knowingly, not to let die.
Lace, a women's industry
Behind these coiffes and fichus lies an immense, long-invisible labour: lace. In the Velay, around Le Puy-en-Velay, whole valleys of women lived, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, throwing bobbins across a pillow, from morning to night.
It was a real trade, often the only cash income of the peasant household. The lacemakers worked outdoors in summer, grouped for company, their fingers going faster than the eye can follow. A merchant came round to gather the work and carried it to town.
We tend to see lace as a frivolous luxury. For these women, it was bread, earned by a patient labour that ruined the eyes before forty. The pretty, here, had a cost we forget.
Guipure and the counted thread
The lace of Le Puy has its stitches, its grounds, its names. Guipure, denser and more graphic, sold across Europe and as far as America. Each basin had its speciality, as each vineyard has its grape.
What strikes you is the logic of little material and much time. A thread, a pillow stuck with pins, wooden bobbins, and hours. Out of almost nothing, a light and precious thing was drawn. The exact reverse of a mass-produced garment.
This economy of the patient gesture runs everywhere in this notebook, from the Aran knit to the Sámi embroidery. The France of thread is one of its great pages.
Boutis and the elegance of terroir
Let us go down one last time to Provence, for the boutis. Two layers of white cloth, a traced design, and a cord slipped between the two layers to make the motif stand out in relief. All in white on white, without a colour, just the play of shadow on the quilting.
It was made into bedspreads, petticoats, trousseau pieces a mother began at the birth of a daughter. A work of patience, again, where luxury lies in the relief of a thread rather than in gold or silk.
That is perhaps the thread of all this sewn France: no single costume, but everywhere the same idea. Make beauty with little, put the time where it shows, and pass on pieces you keep. An elegance of terroir, discreet and stubborn.
