When the Royal School of Needlework opened its first studio above a bonnet shop in London’s Sloane Street in 1872, it had two aims. The first was to provide work for gentlewomen of straitened means at a time when employment opportunities were scarce. The second was to conserve and promote the art of embroidery — often portrayed as demure and traditional — as a dynamic, expressive medium.
A new exhibition, 150 Years of the Royal School of Needlework: Crown to
Catwalk, at London’s Fashion and Textile Museum until September 4, brings its history to life in colourful detail. More than 120 pieces — including gleaming coronation robes, collaborations with fashion designers E Tautz and Sarah Burton, avant-garde designs in upcycled materials, ecclesiastical trappings and Arts and Crafts upholstery — convey the skill and diversity of the school’s output. It is all proof that needlework is anything but old-fashioned.
I get a sense of this on my tour of the school, set in the panelled “grace and favour” apartments of Hampton Court. The school’s BA degree in hand embroidery is unique in Europe (graduates have worked in film and for fashion houses such as Alexander McQueen). The shorter certificate and diploma is also taught at the school’s outposts in Japan and the US. Its teacher-training Future Tutors Programme lasts three years. Online courses, set up to meet demand during the pandemic, are flourishing. There are now 1,000 students: from school leavers to retirees achieving ambitions of late-life creativity.
An atmosphere of cheerful concentration pervades. One group is learning 17th-century Jacobean crewelwork — flowing foliage and fauna motifs worked in wool on linen — a list of stitches by their side. A few doors away, the BA students are designing gloves inspired by portraits. In the studio, tables are shrouded in dust sheets to conserve works in progress and I am politely asked not to take photos. This is where fragile historic textiles are restored and commissions — for artists and designers — produced. A recent piece, teeming with wild flowers, looks like a painting.
Inspecting the back of a fine, 19th-century piece worked in silk, I ask: “Where are the knots?” Everyone laughs. At the RSN, knots are used to secure the stitches, but never seen.
The school’s earliest intake was impoverished middle-class women, often from families where the father had died young, leaving them with no breadwinner. Students paid for nine days of lessons, says chief executive Susan Kay-Williams from her attic office, which looks out on to royal topiary. “After three days, if they showed no aptitude, they were sent home with a refund.” Successful candidates moved to the workroom. Speed was all as workers were paid by the item, hence the phrase “piecework”.
It was not until 1900 that salaries — “enough to keep body and soul together” — were introduced, says Kay-Williams, author of An Unbroken Thread: Celebrating 150 Years of The Royal School of Needlework.
The school operated on a non-profit principle, she says. “We were established as what would be called a social enterprise today.” The RSN became a registered charity in 1964, and receives no government funding. The attached workroom is now called the Studio.
“If we bring in more money than we spend, it goes to underpin future developments. The income achieved is also used to support bursaries for students on the Future Tutor and degree programmes,” says Kay-Williams.
The RSN’s other founding aim was, as its first president, Princess Helena, daughter of Queen Victoria, wrote, “to restore the nearly lost art of ornamental needlework to its high place among decorative arts”. In the 1800s elaborate embroideries — for clothes or interiors — were eclipsed by the simpler Berlin Wool Work style. The RSN set out to reverse the trend.
Good design was key. To maintain standards an art committee, led by artists Sir Frederic Leighton and Val Prinsep, was established. Early designs by Arts and Crafts luminaries William Morris, Walter Crane and Edward Burne-Jones made their debut at the Philadelphia Centennial International Exhibition in 1876. Swingeing import tariffs of 35 per cent meant that the venture was a commercial flop. But it did bring art embroidery to the US. Candace Wheeler, the Martha Stewart of her day, was inspired to establish New York’s answer to the RSN: the Society of Decorative Art.
To provide workers with steady employment, departments for church work and military regalia were opened. Royal commissions are another of the show’s draws. The Queen Mother’s 1937 robe of estate, embellished with Commonwealth flora, and Edward VII’s cloth of gold coronation cope both feature. For her coronation in 1953, the Queen’s robe of state gleamed with tiny olives and sheaves of wheat — symbols of a new Elizabethan era of prosperity — hand-stitched in gold thread.
Larger works are rarely signed. “One of our original mantras was that no matter how many people work on a piece — it will always look like the work of one person. The other one is ‘never a seat shall go cold’, because as soon as one person gets up, another will take their place. It’s teamwork,” says Kay-Williams.
Graduates have gone on to work in film and for fashion houses such as Alexander McQueen
Royalty also made an appearance at the RSN’s annual sales. Held at grand houses with a butler hovering in attendance, they were a staple of the London social “season” until the second world war. Household paraphernalia — hot water bottle covers, bed linen — filled the stands.
Lingerie is one of the show’s more surprising exhibits, but the school has always had to earn its keep. In the 1910s and 1920s, brides-to-be could stock their trousseaux with negligees or dressing gowns in fashionable tones of eau-de-nil or apricot. Tatler’s diarist, visiting a sale, gushed in 1916: “Awful nice sensation it gives you combining, well, pink crepe de chine with charity.”
Perceptions of embroidery — and its uses — have changed over the decades, says Kay-Williams. In draughty Tudor or Jacobean homes, wool-worked hangings and bed covers provided insulation. For the Elizabethans, a finely worked cuff signified wealth. In the late 19th century, blossom-strewn screens brought the modish Japonisme style to interiors.
Then there is the gender question. Sewing is often portrayed as feminine. Historically that is not the case. “In the 1930s all the royal family stitched, including the King and the Dukes of York and Gloucester. Needlework was also a way to pass the hours for naval officers or soldiers posted abroad,” says Kay-Williams.
Sometimes things get political. The suffragettes embroidered handkerchiefs with slogans and protesters at Greenham Common in the 1980s stitched banners, she says. To mark the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta in 2015, the artist Cornelia Parker used needlework for her giant version of it. Worked on by a team of prisoners, craftspeople and celebrity volunteers, the 13-metre-long piece was a reproduction of the medieval document’s Wikipedia page. The RSN’s contribution to the “Great Charter of Freedoms” was, unsurprisingly, the gold crown.
Pekinese, Van Dyke, bullion, French knot: RSN students learn stitches that date back to antiquity. The school’s handbook, printed in 1880, is still referred to. Standards are scrupulous, but this is not slavish learning by rote. “We want students to improvise, pick their own stitches and colours,” says Kay-Williams. Traditional materials are silk, wool or metallic thread; straw, feathers or upcycled fish netting are welcome too. For designer E Tautz, students appliqued scraps of denim and cotton salvaged from recycling banks.
“That’s what makes us different,” says Kay-Williams. “We teach traditional hand skills but we challenge students to go in dynamic directions.”
She shows me a portrait. What looks like pen and ink is in fact blackwork, an Elizabethan stitch adapted for pictorial effect. The sitter is Norman Willis, former Trades Union Congress leader and RSN Trustee. During fraught union negotiations, Willis would also dig out his needle and thread “for that calming moment”, she says.
The RSN was an early advocate of needlework for mindfulness, another of the show’s themes. During the first world war, it offered free sewing lessons to soldiers and created designs for returning servicemen as occupational therapy (the altar covering at St Paul’s Cathedral was worked on by injured servicemen). In the second world war, sewing kits for regimental badges were dispatched to prisoners of war.
Lockdown also prompted many people to rummage in their sewing boxes. “People realised how helpful it was for releasing pressure,” says Kay-Williams. Visitors to the show will have a chance to sample its therapeutic qualities for themselves.
Remote learning classes and international summer school sessions operate in three different time zones like “an invisible thread”, says Kay-Williams, binding stitchers across the globe.
Raising funds to cover the costs of materials, salaries and bursaries has always been “painful”, she adds. Support comes from City of London livery companies, legacies, foundations and friends.
Resourcefulness and agility have ensured the charity’s survival. Its latest venture is the RSN Stitch Bank, a digital resource set up in 2021 to conserve endangered techniques. Free to access, there are 225 techniques (supporters can also “adopt a stitch”), accompanied by how-to videos. It has proved a hit with the school’s new, global following of stitchers who are keeping needlework alive and relevant: just as its 19th-century founders intended.
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