EDITOR’S NOTE: Examining clothes through the ages, Dress Codes investigates how the rules of fashion have influenced different cultural arenas — and your closet.
New York
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In a windowless room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Antonio Ratti Textile Center, several swaths of lace hundreds of years old are spread out on a giant expanse of black paper. The tiniest of stitches have been formed into circles, swirls and even animals, some of which took years to make by hand with painstaking precision.
In previous centuries, making lace even a few feet long would have required a years-long commitment. Today, it can be produced much faster by machine, and over the past year, was seen…
