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24th January 2025

Now that lace doilies, tablecloths, veils, christening robes, and wedding dresses like this one in After The Wedding (mid-C20, Lakeland Museum) by Joseph Hardman, are all on the wane, there remains only a glimmer of optimism for the lace industry in the form of fashion, couture houses, and the occasional royal wedding (the lace in Catherine Middleton's wedding dress was discussed in great detail). For many people, though, the perception of the "chaste" Nottingham lace curtain as a symbol of bourgeois, dull, conventional life as articulated by EM Forster in his unfinished novel Nottingham Lace (1901) and in A Room with a View has altered tastes and thus demand for this once-important textile. 

 

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