Fabric made with metallic or metallic-looking yarns that give it a reflective surface.
The Académie française defines lamé as cloth enriched with lames, thin strips, of gold or silver, and by extension any fabric whose threads give a shimmering metallic effect. In the woven form, flat metallic threads are interlaced with silk or other yarns and make either the ground or the pattern, so a lamé may be a plain metallic cloth or a brocade with a metal figure. Brentano’s textile glossary also counts fabric embroidered with metal.
The metal is often not solid metal. Lurex, a metallic yarn, is aluminum-coated plastic, made so that it does not tarnish; it imitates gold and silver thread at lower cost and is often knitted. Lamé therefore names an effect and the role of the metallic yarn, not a fiber content. The V&A’s examples include a silver lamé wedding dress of 1923 and a 1933 evening cape by Elsa Schiaparelli in gold and silver looped lamé.
In job listings
The word itself is rare in current listings. Metallic yarns and trims fall to textile development: roles that develop a house’s textile accessories, or the textile trimmings used across its ready-to-wear collections, working with suppliers from development to industrialization. See current textile development roles.
