Founded in 1858 under the name of Michonet (then supplier to such fashion legends as the House of Worth) before being bought by the Lesage family in the 1920s, Maison Lesage has created exceptional embroidery motifs, often requiring hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of precise beadwork, for star fashion designers across the decades. Fashion legends such as Elsa Schiaparelli (with her famous Circus and Zodiac collections) and Yves Saint Laurent (whose Van Gogh iris-embroidered jackets number over 200,000 pearls and 250,000 sequins) worked exclusively with Maison Lesage, but the embroiderer also collaborated with a raft of international designers, including Balmain, the House of Worth, Vionnet and Lacroix. Perhaps best known today for the masterpieces it created for Karl Lagerfeld's Chanel collections, Maison Lesage was bought by Chanel in 2002 to ensure the survival of its unique history and extraordinary skills. Illustrated with specially commissioned photography of the house s archives and illuminated with texts by Patrick Mauriès, Maison Lesage is both a tribute to exceptional craftsmanship and a journey through a hundred years of fashion at its most sumptuous and inventive. Table of Contents: 1. Providers of excellence 2. The birth of luxury 3. A stroke of luck 4. Handover 5. Bias cut 6. Mainteuses and Lunévilleuses 7. Marie-Louise 8. A house is born 9. A change of address 10. Schiaparelli 11. Acrobats and butterflies 12. The unexpected 13. Survival 14. Embroidery, trimmings and textiles 15. François 16. American adventures 17. Return to Paris 18. Asparagus and flowers 19. Old and new regime 20. Six hundred hours 21. When fashion is in fashion 22. 29 and 92 23. A passage to India 24. A long friendship 25. Changes