In the lace and embroidered fabrics of the past, the history of European women is written from ancient times to the beginning of our century; for millennia, generations of grandmothers, mothers and daughters have handed down the precious culture of lace, perhaps the only form of art, together with cooking, granted to the female world, the only expressive tool that women have had available to express his own aesthetic sensibility and his own creativity. 
 
And although for a long time considered a minor artistic manifestation, the production of openwork and embroidery of the past has left us real masterpieces written in needle, objects on which the taste and discreet love for beauty of so many that we imagine today has been transfused. bent over the loom in the endless winter nights, engaged in a patient game of stitches and threads. 
 
In this way dream kits materialized, in which each garment represented a story in itself, special and unrepeatable. Nowadays, characterized by mass production and the repetition of standardized and impersonal industrial items, the charm of the unique, individual and highly original piece is felt to the maximum degree, packaged for a particular occasion with a very special care: hence, next to the enhancement of ancient openwork lace, the recovery of catalogs and illustrated reviews dedicated to lace and embroidery. 
 
"Embroidery 1870" comes to life, the second volume of a series dedicated to the needlework of the last century that proposes, directly from nineteenth-century French magazines specialized in the sector, an extraordinary review of quilted creations, still today a source of inspiration for all those looking for decorative motifs and ideas with which to embellish fabrics and fabrics. From the very delicate filets, from the relief designs that stand out on the soft backgrounds, from the refined transparencies created by the alternation of empty and full, come valid ideas not only for those who work in the field of linen, but more generally for every graphic or designer because there can be no beautiful embroidery without a beautiful design. Proof of this are these images which, while retaining the flavor of ancient tradition, perfectly embody modern taste and iconographic-ornamental sensitivity.