A Career in Embroidery: from designer to historian and international explorer

What does it mean to dedicate a whole working life to embroidery, and to do it in more than one way? In this talk, embroidery designer and historian Nadia Albertini reflects on a career spent entirely in the world of embroidery, moving between very different ways of practising it.

Over twenty years, her path has led from the design studios of haute couture houses and embroidery ateliers to the reading rooms of archives and museums. It has also taken her into university classrooms and onto the road as a guide for textile travellers. Each role has offered a different vantage point on the same craft, and each has changed the way she sees the others.

Nadia will begin at the workbench, with the realities of designing embroidery for fashion: developing samples, working with master embroiderers, and turning an idea into stitch, bead and thread under the pressure of the couture calendar. She will then explain how a designer’s curiosity about “how was this made, and by whom?” led her into historical research. The talk will take audiences behind the scenes of the embroidery archive. She will show what surviving samples, drawings, ledgers and correspondence can reveal about the people, techniques and businesses behind historic embroidery, and why archives can be as inspiring for makers as they are for historians.