Embroidery has long been intertwined with the history of dress and gender. In early modern Europe, needlework functioned as a marker of refinement and social status. As Jennifer Van Horn demonstrates, embroidered samplers and textiles acted as social documents, evidence of a woman’s discipline, gentility, and place within the household economy.¹ 

By the nineteenth century, embroidery occupied an even more complex position within fashion. It adorned garments and accessories, yet it also represented a form of gendered labor that was aesthetically prized even as it was socially undervalued. Kathryn King argues that needlework was both a creative and intellectual practice, yet it was frequently dismissed as trivial “women’s work.”² This tension shaped the conditions under which women produced embroidered fashion and helps explain why the Arts & Crafts Movement became such a powerful site for rethinking the relationship between labor and beauty.

The movement’s revival of hand embroidery tried to reframe it as a legitimate art form. May Morris, for example, transformed embroidery from a domestic pastime into a professionalized craft. Her designs for clothing and household textiles emphasized stylized natural motifs, harmonious color palettes, and the expressive potential of stitch.³ Similarly Workshops such as the Dun Emer Guild and Hastings Needle Work, extended this ethos by creating spaces where women could design, produce, and sell embroidered goods.⁴ These workshops blurred the boundaries between fashion, labor, and art, demonstrating that embroidery could be both economically viable and artistically innovative.

Fashion Heritage Europe similarly emphasizes that Arts & Crafts ideals offered “the other side of modernity”: a vision of fashion grounded in slowness and authenticity. ⁶ Instead of chasing novelty, it pushed designers drew on medieval and folk traditions, creating garments that felt timeless rather than trendy. Embroidery became a key site for this philosophy, allowing wearers to display individuality through its patterns and designs As Arts & Crafts aesthetics filtered into mainstream fashion those principles shaped everything from tea gowns to accessories, creating a recognizable Arts & Crafts “look” 

This broader history of embroidered dress and accessories provides the context for understanding the handkerchief as a fashion object. Though small, the handkerchief has carried enormous cultural weight. As the Complete Handkerchief History notes, it has long served as a symbol of refinement, flirtation, and social status.⁸ In the Renaissance, Bella Mirabella shows, the handkerchief occupied a limbo space between the intimate and the public: a cloth meant to absorb bodily fluids also signaled hygiene and social identity.⁹ This duality requires distinguishing between the utilitarian handkerchief and the decorative one, the latter functioning as a personal, wearable accessory. Women embroidered decorative handkerchiefs as gifts, love tokens, and ways to display their skill. 

These earlier traditions became pillars for the Arts & Crafts Movement, which deliberately revived and romanticized historical approaches to needlework as a way to reclaim authenticity in everyday accessories. By the nineteenth century, decorative handkerchiefs were essential elements of dress for both men and women. They were tucked into sleeves, waistcoats, and pockets. They could be edged with lace, monogrammed, or elaborately embroidered. My project happens to be all three. As Amy Boyce Osaki notes, sewing and needlework were considered “truly feminine employment,” and the handkerchief once again became a canvas on which women demonstrated refinement and technical mastery.¹⁰ Even when small, these textiles participated in the visual language of dress.

Footnotes

What makes something art? It’s the question that refuses to die, haunting museums, classrooms, and dinner‑party conversations alike. And because one can agree on what is or isn’t art perhaps it’s more apt to say it’s a question that haunts the whole world. The usual distinction goes something like this: art is personal expression, emotional, conceptual, valuable; craft is technical skill, functional, decorative, and somehow lesser. But this nice tidy binary collapses the moment you look deeper.

For much of Western history, artists and craftsmen were the same people. They belonged to different guilds which all trained in their specialized trades such as ceramics, glass blowing, textiles, metalwork and carpentry. The idea of the artist as a lone visionary genius is a relatively recent invention. As Amara Desai argues in Art vs. Craft: A False Hierarchy?, it wasn’t until the Renaissance that the “artist” emerged as a singular, elevated figure. By the nineteenth century, academic institutions had cemented a hierarchy that privileged painting and sculpture above all else. Once those two media became associated with spirituality, intellect, and transcendent personal expression, everything else was relegated to the category of “mere decoration.”

So art became painting and sculpture. Craft became everything else. And yet… that definition satisfies no one. We’re back where we started. 

What makes something art? Don’t have an answer for that yet? Don’t worry because no one truly does. 

Even dictionaries can’t agree. Merriam-Webster has six separate definitions for art including: “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects” (So art is a skill?) The English Cambridge dictionary defines art as “the making of objects, images, music, etc. that are beautiful or that express feelings” (so art has to be beautiful or express feeling?) The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary offers “the use of the imagination to express ideas or feelings, particularly in painting, drawing or sculpture” (so art requires imagination?) And my personal favorite wiktionary.com says art is “The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colours, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the senses and emotions, usually specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium.” which is so broad and vague it can be stretched to include all human activity. There is a position to be argued that art is so personal and simultaneously so public that it remains indefinable, but I digress. 

And If no one knows what art is, how can we possibly decide what it isn’t? Yet if the definition of art is unstable, the definition of craft has been aggressively stabilized, Craft is rarely treated as a subset of art; it’s treated as a rung below it. The implication is that craft lacks the creativity, imagination, emotion, and beauty supposedly inherent to art. Elizabeth Wolfe, in Arts versus Crafts: Challenging Notions of Worthy Creations, notes how the language of “fine art” implies mastery and genius, while craft is framed as accessible, common, even childish. “Anyone can make a craft,” she writes, “but only a genius can produce art.” Put simply, Craft is framed as lesser, because someone decided it should be. But who gets to decide what is or isn’t moving? What counts as mastery? Why is technical skill revered in oil painting but dismissed in weaving or metalwork? A large factor for this superficial divide lies in who is doing the making. Many crafts like textiles, pottery, embroidery, quilting, sewing, beadwork etc. have long been associated with “women’s work.” Anthea Callen addresses this in her Sexual Division of Labour in the Arts and Crafts Movement: the devaluation of craft is inseparable from the devaluation of women’s labor. When men carved marble, it was art. When women carved wood, it was hobbyism. When men painted tapestries, it was genius. When women embroidered them, it was domesticity. Rosie Parker put it bluntly in Spare Rib (1975):

“The same characteristics were ascribed to both women and embroidery; they were seen as mindless, decorative and delicate – like the icing on the cake, good to look at, adding taste and status, but devoid of significant content.”

For this blog, embroidery is the most revealing example of the art/craft divide’s absurdity. With many textiles, one can at least gesture toward function: a quilt keeps you warm, a garment covers the body, a rug cushions the floor. But embroidery? It is not structural. It is not functional. It exists purely to be looked at. If anything should qualify as “art” under the fine‑art world’s own criteria (beauty, expression, imagination, uselessness) it is embroidery and yet this art has been persistently dismissed as frivolous, decorative, pastime. The inconsistency is glaring.

So where does this leave us? The arts vs. crafts debate is less a philosophical question than a cultural construction one shaped by gender, class, industrialization, and shifting ideas about labor and expression. The Arts & Crafts Movement itself emerged as a rebellion against industrial mass production, but it also exposed the contradictions of a society that romanticized handwork while devaluing the people who performed it.

As I begin this project. I’m interested in how these debates still continue today. What does it mean to treat embroidery as an art form? What happens when we refuse the hierarchy altogether?

Maybe the question isn’t what makes something art.
Maybe the better question is why we ever needed the distinction in the first place.