Brocade

The name comes from the Italian broccato, embossed or figured cloth, from brocco — a twisted thread, and further back a projecting point or nail. The word captures the essential fact about the fabric: the pattern stands proud of the ground because extra thread has been introduced to build it, not because the surface has been printed or embroidered after weaving. Brocade is decoration made structural.

Discontinuous Weft

The technical definition turns on a single word. In brocade, supplementary weft threads — frequently silk, historically wrapped in flattened gold or silver — are carried into the cloth only where the design requires them, then left floating or cut away on the reverse. This is what separates it from damask, which is self-patterned by contrasting the faces of one weave and is therefore reversible, and from jacquard, which is not a fabric at all but the loom mechanism that made complex figuring affordable from 1804 onwards. A brocade can be woven on a jacquard loom. So can a damask. The words describe different things.

Lucca to Lyon

Silk figuring followed the trade routes west: from China and Byzantium to Sicily and Lucca, then to Venice, Genoa and Florence, and finally to Lyon, which the French crown built into the industry’s capital and defended with tariffs for three centuries. A handful of Lyon houses still weave eighteenth-century patterns on hand looms, at a few centimetres a day, for the restoration of French châteaux — the same drawlooms, in some cases the same point papers.

Brocade now appears mostly at the ceremonial end of fashion: bridal, evening, historical reference. It remains a reliable indicator of a house’s ambitions, because the cloth is expensive, difficult to cut without breaking the pattern, and entirely unforgiving of a badly matched seam.