From its inception in the 16th century up until the 19th century, European needle or bobbin lace remained an intensive, extremely specialized craft traditionally carried out by women exclusively.

The value and fascination of lace derive mostly from its fabrication and not the originality of its design or the internal value of the material used — most of the time linen or later cotton. Lace commanded a high price, reserving its use for the wealthy religious or secular elite and drawing attention from other cultures as an object of fascination.

We trace the passage of this craft from the hands of female lacemaking guilds to industrially made machine-lace products designed for repeatability and speed. In contrast, robotics of today can be employed for bespoke, differentiated tasks, suggesting a move away from standardization and a return back to customization. We find that the fundamental differences between the kinematics and control of humans and robots, however analogous, can lead to new, unexpected results.

In modern times, hand-made lace remained both a product of luxury and a sign of restraint and modesty. These last qualities were expressed by the material itself, threads of linen or cotton, and by the color, white, a symbol of purity. Members of the New England upper class, like Elizabeth Allen Marquand, wife of one of the founders of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and mother of its first director, aimed to present themselves as the moral descendants of the Puritan settlers. But hand-made lace was also a luxury item: the labor and skill that went into its creation transformed the cheap raw material into one of the most expensive items of a lady’s wardrobe.

Signed and dated in Venice 1888, this drawing by the French-born American artist and historian August Jaccaci represents a series of female needle lacemakers and is probably set in the island of Burano, in the laguna. Burano was one of the main centers for the creation of the finest and most sought-after lace in the early modern period, until the beginning of the 19th century, when the craft almost died out. In 1872, following a severe winter impacting the fishing industry, a group of noble Italian women, led by Countess Adriana Marcello and Queen Margherita of Savoy, established a school aimed at reviving the art of needle lacemaking and providing an income for the islanders. The drawing probably shows one of the school’s first cohorts of women trained in the art. The school and its museum, the Burano Museo del Merletto, are still active today, even if the hardship and labor required to create hand-made lace generally fail to attract a younger generation of islanders who now mostly live from the tourist industry.

By the end of the 18th century, several inventors had tried to design machines capable of producing lace. One of them, John Heathcoat, is shown on this Japanese woodblock print. Part of the series “Lives of Great People of the Occident,” it represents Heathcoat offering his wife the first successful result from his knitting machine. A product that was until then exclusively made by female labor, is here manufactured by male entrepreneurs. Heathcoat would end up establishing a lucrative lacemaking factory in Tiverton, Devon, after his first establishment was destroyed by the Luddites, a secret association of textile workers fighting against mechanization. This story highlights the tensions in the lacemaking industry between skilled craftsmen and manufacturers. Machine-made lace would never entirely replace hand-made lace, but would significantly reduce the number of traditional lacemakers, depriving many craftswomen of a source of important income.

Situated against the shift from guild craft to mechanization, we recast lacemaking as programmable choreography using two six-axis robotic arms equipped with custom grippers and a depth-sensing camera. Our approach was deliberately human-mimetic: translating cross and twist actions into programmable moves. Along the way, we built a framework for managing a high degree of indeterminacy in this system, leveraging numerical control to hold and place material in precise 3D locations and orientations in space, something that is hard for a human to do continuously. At the same time, the trials clarified where current tools rub against the craft: vision, control, path planning, robot kinematics, and human–computer interfaces are typically designed for repeated tasks and often become slow and cumbersome when used for one-off choreography. Today’s industrial robots pair naturally with simple, rigid parts and resist soft, entangled strips with short persistence length. We read this not as a verdict, but as a reflection of our 2021 toolset and timeline, just before a wave of advances in robot learning and deformable-object manipulation matured in the literature.

In practice, we reversed our original bottom-up plan, where the outcome would emerge stitch by stitch, and adopted a top-down strategy so the installation would fit the gallery and the bill of materials. We used a minimal modeling approach to calculate ideal distances between nodes, then prefabricated the strips in 2D with those drill holes, and then treated assembly like a 3D puzzle that skilled hands could complete in situ (read more about that approach here). This choice let us focus on mechanics, especially scale and stiffness, while acknowledging lace’s historical tendency to evade full mechanization and the state of available resources. Framed this way, lace becomes a model experiment for compliant, entangled fabrication, clarifying how to divide perception, control, and design across human and machine, and pointing toward ongoing work that is expanding what robots can do with soft materials.

The development of machine lace extended the use of lace in areas previously not systematically explored because of their scale.

Examples include curtains and wall decorations, where the size of the strands remained the same but the area that the textile can cover was greatly expanded. However, they remain confined to private, interior and domestic uses because of their inherent fragility. Scaling up and expanding the range of materials used to design lacing patterns can open to applications in the public and urban spaces. When prototyping robotics processes we often begin with a scale that fits the constraints of the available tools. To study robotically fabricated lace, we have dramatically increased the scale of the individual strand, as well as the spaces between the strands. Once again, this can change the way we interact with and experience a lace object, moving from the realm of surface into the interstitial.

Machine-made lace was not only incomparably cheaper than hand-made lace (allowing large segments of the population to acquire it), but also easier and faster to produce on a scale rarely seen before. New usages were adopted, like the one seen on this glass plate negative by the pictorialist photographer Clarence H. White. In this typical American bourgeois interior of the early 20th century, lace curtains take center stage. The transparency of the fabric allows light to penetrate the dark interior while the lace grid evokes the geometric, bevelled glass of the window and the floral motifs play against the outside vegetation. From a commodity reserved for the financial elite, be it secular or religious, by the 20th century, lace had become synonymous with bourgeois and working classes interiors.

This exquisite example of Italian needle lace is one of the oldest in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This geometric cutwork is characteristic of the free-flowing patterns made in late-16th-century Italy called punto-in-aria. Here the link with the woven ground has been broken and lace turns from trimming or means of surface decoration into a fabric in its own right. This border made of fine linen with a rose pattern shows a grid of needle-woven and overcast bars, the solid areas worked in pairs of knotted buttonhole stitches and elaborated with buttonholed bars and picots. The extraordinary complexity of the technique can only be appreciated up close and was produced in a small scale.

The use of lace in fashion is linked to the physical manipulation of the fiber material, which upon creation takes the form of its base, into something that can describe volumes distinct from the body.

For example, a collar can be made stiff by starching and a ruff can become voluminous by ruching. While the former involves the addition of an external material, the latter speaks to the ability of a material to propel itself into the third dimension by the manipulation of its geometry. Painting lace objects, especially those made stiff by these processes, have been a stimulating challenge for painters, who could showcase their virtuosity in indicating both dramatic shortening and complex effects of transparency. The study of elasticity, which spans several centuries, reveals that a stiff material with a slender cross section will buckle out of plane as it seeks a minimal energy state. In engineering, such large deformations were studied in order to be prevented as they typically indicate structural failure. More recently there has been an abundance of interest in eliciting large elastic deformations for a wide range of applications in scales ranging from the nano to the architectural. Applied to lace, we consider the effects of working with inherently stiff yet pliant, elastic ribbons as opposed to formless round threads and witness the 3D forms that emerge.

This magnificent portrait of an anonymous female member of the financial elite of the Low Countries displays the characteristic and important use of lace in 17th-century European fashion. Made of fabric – here, probably linen – lace needs either a support on which to rest or an additive to give it the stiffness that it inherently lacks. The white lace cuffs contrast with the sumptuous black dress on which they rest. Their geometric design of fine cutwork with points of detached needle lace follows examples of contemporary pattern books, in which lace appears in negative as black ink on the white page. As for the neck ruff, it is free-standing, held either by wire or pasteboard, or heavily starched. The lace cuffs and collar also allowed the painter, Cornelis de Vos, to display his virtuosity in evoking transparency and spectacular effects of shortening.

This small sculpture testifies to the association of lace with luxury fashion and the obsession with stiffness that characterizes research around textile materials. Starting in the 1880s, Dresden manufacturers started to produce porcelain lace figurines made following a technique invented a century earlier in the famous nearby porcelain center of Meissen. To create the illusion of real fabric, decorators would dip actual, delicate machine-made net lace into porcelain slip before applying it by hand to the porcelain figure. When fired in a kiln, the fabric would burn away, leaving a hard but extremely fragile shell of frozen crinoline skirts and billowy material behind. Buyers could therefore acquire these figurines at a relatively low price, where lace has acquired the stiffness of porcelain.

This photograph by a student of Clarence H. White shows how the term lace can migrate to materials that are defined above all by their stiffness. Before taking on photography, Latimer worked as an engineer in the Taylor-Wharton Iron & Steel Company and retained a long-term interest in suspended bridges. Here lace is defined by the pattern the steel cables form by intersecting on the open sky. It returns to the definition of lace as a material in which the pattern is surrounded by air, with bars of net holding the various elements of the pattern together. Here, soft material — linen, cotton, or silk — is replaced by iron and steel, opening the many possibilities we can think of for lace in architecture and design.