The value of the quality
Linen
From its origin up to the present day
From its origin up to the present day, ten thousand years of history has marked the development of the uses of this vegetable fibre, deemed to be the most antique in the world. The first traces found of transforming linen into fabric are dated around 8,000 B.C. when it was used widely by all the antique civilisations facing the Mediterranean. Egypt was where linen underwent its first massive development by means of highly advanced transformation techniques (6,000 B.C.). It reached maximum circulation in Europe in the medieval time. Not even the introduction of cotton by the Arabs, around 1300, managed to dim its predominance.
With the Renaissance, the taste for an elegant lifestyle strengthened the presence of linen in everyday life, especially for making sheets and shirts. Consumption grew in the centuries that followed but the cultivation and transformation techniques remain traditional: linen is still processed by hand.
The linen industry was mechanised between the XVII and XVIII century with the Industrial Revolution, under incitement of Napoleon I in France. It was not until the second half of the XVIII century, when the first spinning machines were invented and the plantations in North America grew much bigger, that cotton became a mass product and its use finally prevailed.
Today the best linen is grown in Normandy and Belgium which is where the best spinning mills in the world get their raw materials.