Notions | Embroidery

We’ve now created a couple of pieces featuring our own custom embroidery. The first was the Camille Skirt, followed by the Leith Top — quiet beginnings that felt both tentative and meaningful. For both, we drew inspiration from early 1900s samplers, those careful studies of needle and thread stitched by hand more than a century ago. The motifs were simple, a bit restrained even, and we chose to keep the thread colors minimal, like a soft thought rather than a declaration. The embroidery was meant to feel discovered, not announced.

Yet we’ve long felt the pull to go a bit further, to challenge ourselves a little more.

There is something especially stirring about the folk-embroidered peasant blouses of the 1930s and 1940s — garments that feel alive with symmetrical rhythm and symbolism, where everyday silhouettes were elevated through dense, purposeful patterns. We’ve always wanted to attempt a more faithful homage to that era: something more vibrant, embroidery that is slightly more complex, but still grounded in authenticity rather than embellishment for its own sake.

Recently, we’ve been developing a vintage-inspired red embroidered peasant top, and even explored translating it into a dress. But embroidery has its own temperament and in this case, the embroidery placement and the dress shape & fabric did not speak the same language (definitely leaning more 70s inspired pagan/cult, rather than easy and carefree). Still, we're determined to attempt a dress again at a later point.

Embroidery is delicate in more ways than one. There is a fine line between something feeling poetic and something feeling overly precious and also what might read as arts-and-crafts. Neither is inherently wrong, but for Atèlette we do want our pieces to feel ornamental without purpose. The embroidery must belong to the garment, as if it has always been there.

And then, of course, there is the practical reality of production. While modern machines now execute what once required countless hours by hand, complexity still carries weight. Each additional thread color, each increase in density, adds to the cost of custom embroidery. Technology has eased the labor, but not the value of intricacy. Scale and size also needs to be accounted for and what is the purpose for the embroidery and for which silhouette. The design we worked on for the peasant top looked lovely on the top, but did not translate for the dress. We can't really explain exactly why, it just looked wrong.

To work with embroidery, then, is to balance romance with restraint — honoring history while remaining intentional in the present. It is a slow conversation between past and future, written carefully in thread.