The World of Lace About the Lace from the Flower Lace Cover

――: We’re very grateful for the beautiful lace you provided for the Flower Lace covers. There’s so much we don’t know about lace, so we’d like to ask you some questions.

Mizorogi: We’re always happy to help others learn more about lace.

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Let’s get started. What does “lace” refer to, specifically? Is there more than one kind?

Mizorogi: Yes. Countries all over the world have different names for lace, and there are four major types categorized by the way it was woven: Embroidered lace; river lace, which is the oldest mechanically created type; raschel lace, which was developed as a more cost-effective version of river lace; and torchon lace, which is made in strips, like a ribbon.

With embroidered lace, a design is embroidered directly onto a base fabric. Within this broader category is the chemical lace material that we used for the Flower Lace techo cover. After embroidery, we place the textile in hot water around 70 to 80 degrees
Celsius, which melts away the base material. This is the most difficult type to produce.

――: What makes it so difficult?

Mizorogi: Lace that has a backing material is easy to work with. But chemical lace leaves nothing but the embroidery, so that embroidery has to sufficiently support itself.

――: I see. So how do you design such tricky lace?

Mizorogi: First we draw out the pattern, to plan for the architecture of the design. Then we create a punch card at the factory based on that pattern. This serves to program the way we’ll embroider the design into the base fabric.

――: Is that programming automated?

Mizorogi: No, actually. It’s a digital file, but it’s up to us to manually determine where each and every stitch will go. The person doing that by hand is called a puncher, and the final product changes based on the puncher’s technique. The cost is determined by the number of stitches, so it’s in the customer’s interest to keep that number low. But the lower the number, the lower the structural integrity, so the puncher has to find that perfect balance between keeping the design beautiful, keeping the number of stitches low, and ensuring structural integrity.

――: Wow, that’s a pretty technical job.

Mizorogi: It really is. Lace changes so much from one puncher to the next. Those of us in the lace business can tell which company produced a piece of lace just by looking, so in that sense the puncher truly becomes the face of the company. The number of people who can do this job is very limited in Japan, so we’ve only got one puncher at our factory.

――: Only one!

Mizorogi: There are schools to train punchers in China and Taiwan, but in Japan we don’t have that infrastructure. So we’re responsible for training the person here at our company. It’s an extremely valuable position. Our puncher is a gentleman in his forties who used to work the machines at a lace factory. I think he’s in his seventh year as a puncher, and he knows a lot about the business, so he’s an incredibly skilled puncher.

――: How many designs does your company have right now?

Mizorogi: I’d say there are around 20,000 registered in our system.

――: Wow, 20,000! Are your older designs drawn by hand?

Mizorogi: They are. In the past we converted some of the old designs to digital data, but we can’t do that here anymore.

――: What do you mean?

Mizorogi: Embroidery machines are about 15-16 meters wide, so our factory doesn’t have any room for support beams. It’s like a really big, open gymnasium.

We had two big snowstorms in 2014. The weight of the snow collapsed the roof, which broke the machine we used to convert the drawings to data. That machine was the only one of its kind in Japan, so we can’t even get it fixed.

――: Wow, that’s terrible.

Mizorogi: But it’s not like we lost the designs, so all we’ve got to do is create punch cards for them again. We still have the originals on hand to reference.

――: I see, so it’s just a matter of recreating it.

Mizorogi: Right. So we’re gradually working through all our old designs.

――: What a huge undertaking.

Mizorogi: Very much so, and we’re doing that on top of creating new designs. I’m the third generation in this company, and I feel it’s important for us to preserve the strong designs we’ve already got and implement them into our work while also creating new designs. Working to create new designs with the fashion brands who come to work with us is challenging, but it’s also very rewarding.

――: How did you create the design used in the Flower Lace cover?

Mizorogi: That’s an incredibly old, original design that was made before I was born. It was originally used in formalwear for special occasions.

The machine used to create this lace has 550 embroidery needles. Each needle is about 2.7 centimeters (1 inch) apart. When we want to create the design at a larger scale, we remove some of the needles. It all depends on the density and stitch count of the design, of course, but removing a needle means the design will take longer to manufacture, because the remaining needles now have more ground to cover. We removed two out of every three needles for the lace in the Flower Lace cover, so the design covered a stretch of 8.1 centimeters (3 inches). That meant it took about three times as long as when the machine creates small patterns using all 550 needles.

――: How much time does it take?

Mizorogi: Our machines work a little faster now, so it takes us about half a day to produce 100 square meters (1,075 square feet).

――: That’s quite some time.

Mizorogi: Yeah, it takes a long time for the lace to look like that. There’s a lot of embroidery involved, so it’s a really decadent design. The lace uses rayon threads, which have a particular sheen to them.

――: Is rayon often used for lace?

Mizorogi: The highest-quality lace uses silk, as you might expect, but rayon is also very common. We used white threads for the Flower Lace material, but rayon takes colors very well. So it can be dyed with really deep colors and still have that high-quality look. Polyester tends to lose the red part of the hue when it’s treated with the heat used to dye the threads, so if you dye something black, it will turn out a blue-tinged black. Black tends to be presented differently between each country, and Japan uses black with a strong hint of red. Rayon allows the black to retain that red hue within it.

――: Wow, so even the same black can vary like that.

Mizorogi: Yes. Lace tends to be used as a fashion accent, but it’s especially prominent in ceremonies and special occasions. There’s a high demand for black formalwear, so it’s important to be able to produce that beautiful, deep black.

――: Lace does have a really gorgeous, formal look to it.

Mizorogi: It does! So I really want people to go all out during royal weddings and celebrity weddings. (Laughs) The lace industry flourishes right after a really big wedding. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was when there were no lace dresses at Prince Harry’s wedding in England!

――: I see. (Laughs) I didn’t realize that had such a big impact on lace.

Mizorogi: Before the Industrial Revolution, in the time of the French monarchy, artisans would begin hand-crafting a lace dress for the princess at the time of her birth. It would take a decade or two to finish, and she would wear it at her wedding.

――: That really shows how special lace is.

Mizorogi: Nowadays lower-cost raschel lace allows lace to be featured in casual settings as well. But fundamentally, lace is expensive. The most interesting thing about this work is being able to guess the price of clothing with lace on it. (Laughs)

Wow! So, I’ve got this image in my head of lace as a kind of classical craft, but it sounds like it has trends, too.

Mizorogi: The motif of a design must be well-balanced. It can’t be too big, can’t be too small, can’t have holes that are too large, and it can’t be too dense. That all applies to the lace used in the Flower Lace cover, and it covers all the points it needs to become a popular lace design.

――: So it’s a very lace-like lace.

Mizorogi: It’s intricate, but has volume to it, so it’s just right. Lace has a very formal image, in part because it’s uncommon. But you open your techo on a daily basis. There’s something refreshing about putting lace on a thing you see so often.

――: Yeah, we had some people wondering what would happen if we used delicate lace on something people use every day. But we decided to use it for this cover so that people can enjoy the beauty of lace and hold their head up high by carrying something so regal. We wanted users to experience that sense of wanting to take care of it.

Mizorogi: I think the charm of lace is in the way it’s so textured and three-dimensional. A techo cover might be the perfect way to allow people to enjoy lace, so that they can feel the real thing in their hands. If users take good care of their covers, the textile will break in in a way that gives it a really nice vintage feel.