Decorative fabric sewn onto another fabric.
Appliqué is simply the past participle of the French appliquer, to apply — from the Latin applicare, to fold or attach to. The name is a plain description of the act: a shape is cut from one cloth and laid onto another, then secured. Almost every decorative tradition on earth has arrived at the technique independently, because it solves an old problem elegantly. Precious cloth is scarce; appliqué lets a very small quantity of it carry a very large design.
Turned Edge, Raw Edge, Reverse
The craft lives at the border of the applied shape. A turned edge is folded under and stitched down invisibly, giving a soft, sculptural outline. A raw edge is left cut and secured with a satin or blanket stitch, which is faster and reads as more graphic. Reverse appliqué inverts the whole logic: layers are stacked and the upper ones cut away to reveal what lies beneath, so the pattern is excavated rather than added. Each produces a different weight of line, and choosing between them is a design decision, not a technical one.
The Illusion Neckline
In couture the technique reaches its most exacting form in the handling of lace. Motifs are cut individually from a lace panel and re-applied to fine tulle, positioned so the pattern flows across a seam as though it had been woven that way, then stitched down with a hair-fine thread so the tulle beneath disappears against the skin. The result is the illusion neckline — a garment that appears to have grown on the wearer. A single bodice may take several hundred hours, and no two are ever identical.
The work belongs to the embroidery ateliers, and the houses that own them guard the skill closely. Placement, in the end, is the whole art: an appliqué a centimetre out of position is not slightly wrong but visibly, irretrievably wrong.