Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen, Emma Cormack and Michele Majer

Threads of Power delves into one of the world’s most celebrated lace collections—St Gallen’s Textilmuseum—and traces the rich history of lace from its Renaissance origins through mechanisation to contemporary couture. Featuring more than 500 stunning colour and black-and-white illustrations across 432 pages, it reveals lace’s evolution as both luxury ornament and industrial commodity. The narrative moves from Habsburg courts to Spanish American elites and 20th-century fashion houses, exploring lace as a symbol of prestige, power and feminine labour at every turn.

This volume is more than a visual feast—it is a scholarly tapestry. Essays cover early modern fashion, lace revivals, the rise of machine-made guipure lace, and innovations at Swiss firms like Forster Rohner. Contributors examine the intersections of technique, gender, colonialism and visual culture—revealing how fragile threads once bound cloth to identity, status and social change.

About the Author
Emma Cormack (Associate Curator, Bard Graduate Center) and Michele Majer (Assistant Professor, Bard Graduate Center) curated this volume in connection with a major 2022 exhibition in New York. They are joined by an international cast of scholars—including Barbara Karl, Paula Hohti, Femke Speelberg, and Annabel Bonnin Talbot—whose essays draw on archival research, visual analysis, and lace-making expertise to uncover cultural meanings woven into lace across time and geography.

Publication date: 2022
Publisher: Yale University Press / Bard Graduate Center
Pages: 423
ISBN: 9780300263497