Our lavender wands are woven with ribbons from one of France’s last family-run ribbon factories, located in the Haute Loire, not far from Saint Etienne. An opportunity to tell you about the ribbon tradition in this region.<\/p>\n\n
Ribbon is a generally narrow fabric, sometimes as wide as cloth, but distinguished by a visible selvedge. A fashion and luxury accessory, ribbon reached its golden age in the 1815s.<\/p>\n\n
Ribbon-making is one of the traditional activities that have dominated Saint Etienne’s industrial history. Indeed, the first ribbon-makers settled in Saint-Etienne as early as the 16th century. In 1605, a brotherhood of ribbon workers was founded in the church of Saint Etienne.<\/p>\n\n
Initially associated with the silk industry in Lyon, ribbon-making has taken on a life of its own in this region between the Haute Loire and the Loire. From the end of the 18th century, ribbon-making gradually shaped the town and its neighborhoods.<\/p>\n\n
After 1772, mechanical looms were introduced in Saint-\u00c9tienne, which became a major center for silk ribbon manufacture. After the French Revolution and Empire, the ribbon industry boomed, and the period from 1815 to 1856 was a golden age for Saint-Etienne ribbon. The town succeeded in adapting the Jacquard mechanism to the ribbon loom. The advantage of this technical innovation at the time was to produce a greater variety of ribbons. Around 1880, this activity was partly relocated to the countryside, contributing to the development of certain mountain villages in the Pilat and Haute-Loire regions. On the eve of the First World War, the ribbon industry employed 30,000 people and, together with related industries, provided a livelihood for over 80,000 people around Saint-\u00c9tienne. <\/p>\n\n
Since then, the ribbon industry has flourished in the town, enhancing Saint-Etienne’s reputation as the world’s leading ribbon-making city. Today, the Mus\u00e9e d’Art et d’Industrie de Saint-Etienne boasts an exceptional collection of ribbons, with two and a half million samples.<\/p>\n\n
Today, there are still a few traditional ribbon factories in the region, internationally renowned for the quality of their ribbons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our lavender wands are woven with ribbons from one of France’s last family-run ribbon factories, located in the Haute Loire,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24749,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-journal-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elsalenthal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elsalenthal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elsalenthal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elsalenthal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elsalenthal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elsalenthal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24903\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elsalenthal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elsalenthal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elsalenthal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elsalenthal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}