Behind the scenes of an ancient French fabric house
Back in early 2013, a representative from the legendary, but struggling French fabric company Le Manach wrote to Patrick Frey, patriarch of Pierre Frey, to ask if he would be interested in buying the company. However, Patrick did not receive the letter and very nearly missed the chance to acquire an extremely valuable archive and much loved textile collection. When word finally did reach him a few weeks later, a deal was promptly struck. 'I've known Le Manach for as long as I can remember and it was a magical opportunity for us to add to our existing historical archives,' he says.
Le Manach was founded in 1829 in Tours as a family company. By the time it was sold to Pierre Frey, it had an archive of over 4,000 rare, beautiful textiles, the earliest of which date from the sixteenth century. Sophie Rouart, the curator of the Pierre Frey archive, was delighted when the collection from Le Manach arrived. 'It was full of surprises,' she explains. 'My role is like being a detective, tracing the origin of a design and putting a story together.' Sophie shows how the hand-embroidery on an eighteenth-century coat has, over the past 300 years, inspired a silk design for the Elysée Palace, another for the Rothschilds and new designs for Pierre Frey's twenty-first-century clients.
The Le Manach archive is now located in a vaulted stone cellar underneath the Pierre Frey showroom on rue du Mail in Paris. It is rather grander than it sounds. The entrance can be unlocked only using fingerprint recognition, and it is temperature controlled to protect the contents. Large black glass tables await the great and the good of the decorating world who come to explore figured silks, printed cottons, brocatelles, velvets, lampas and damasks. Any of these can be redesigned and woven to a designer's requirements.
This is without doubt a rarefied world, but there is a more accessible side to Le Manach by way of its fabric collection Les Toiles de Tours. It was conceived in the Twenties by Georges Le Manach as an alternative to the expensive silk jacquards of the time. He kept many of the existing designs and added simple geometrics and African-inspired motifs, which were popular then. Woven in cotton and viscose, the result was a rustic, natural look that feels every bit as contemporary today in its vibrant colourways as it did in the Twenties.
The traditional and modern of Le Manach are at their most evident on the looms of Pierre Frey's mill in northern France. Very little is done manually any more; instead, a percussive cacophony of noise is hammered out by an army of machines, each with its own specific job. One rapidly spins thread onto a row of wobbling bobbins, another draws great long lengths from different coloured spools of cotton to build the warp (vertical threads) of a design. The electric looms that weave the Toiles de Tours are highly efficient and allow clients to order as little as one metre in their chosen design and colourway.
The mill has been in the same small village since Pierre Frey started his company in 1935. Some of the more archaic tools have been relegated to a small museum, which is housed in a side room of the factory. It is filled with dusty old logbooks, wooden hand blocks for printing and an ancient looking loom that has not seen any action for a while.
Just outside the doors, between the museum and the main factory floor, is what looks like an identical machine to the loom, except that this one is manned. Olivier Joannen was the only man at the old Le Manach mill in Tours who knew how to operate this nineteenth-century jacquard loom, so when the company was bought, he agreed to move here with his wife and four children.
He weaves just one metre of silk velvet a day. Rather like a precious grand piano that falls out of tune in a slight draught, the jacquard loom is a sensitive creature. When it arrived at the Pierre Frey mill from Tours, it took Olivier seven months to rebuild it. Its appearance may be rustic, but 'Tigre', the beautiful and unique silk velvet Olivier is weaving, is anything but. To produce a 15-metre length, over 900 silk bobbins must be hand-wound. Each one holds eight threads, which are hundreds of metres long. Six colours of silk are combined among the bobbins to produce 36 shades. As Olivier weaves, he feels for the slightest change in tension, which indicates that one of the 900 bobbins needs changing. When it is time for a new design, in huge contrast to the industrious machines next door, it takes Olivier a week to prepare the loom. He is worth his weight in gold - perhaps it's time he got an apprentice.