Linnen

THE ROOTS OF LINEN:

I have no objective reason to claim that linen is Belgian, while on the other hand I have every subjective reason to say that linen is part of my roots as a Belgian.
In my childhood memories, it was very present as a measure of time and space on the road to the coast, this sudden passage through a very strong odour, one of decay
that was at the same time delicious, almost like a stage of initiation in this journey that seemed so long.
There was always a “grown up” to repeat authoritatively on every occasion that “it is the retting of the flax that smells like that”.
Although I am not certain that I ever really saw the very particular blue of the flax fields in flower, this is not really so important as I imagined them so much every time I encountered the fragile yet heady nuance in a garden. Linen was always worn by the farmers and the poor in rustic and regionalist novels. In provincial towns like Bruges or Ghent it covered the opulent tables of the Flemish bourgeoisie where the silverware gleamed softly and where the ceremony of the meal began with the unfolding of the very large and perfectly ironed white napkin.  In my family the “Flanders cloth” was regarded with the kind of respect requiring no justification that is granted only to the eternal values handed down from generation to generation: “linen is the best fabric for the household linens… because that is the way it is.”     Every year a “representative” paid a visit to my grandmother to take her order for the household linen on which was embroidered the two elegantly intertwined initials of my grandfather. From so much tradition there has remained with me a respect for linen that I would no doubt have taken pleasure in transgressing if it had not been on each occasion reaffirmed: when I see how a beautiful linen “falls” or when I wear it and my body feels so good in it or, again an affair of the body, when I slip between the unique freshness of linen sheets.   Linen is the luxury of a comfort that admittedly owes something to a materialism with which the Belgians are so often associated and that they acknowledge without much protest, but linen also has its roots in our culture and in our fields of dark earth that lie beneath a vast “Belgian sky”.

September 24, 2001.

Excerpt from “About fabrics” booklet 5 of the book
“By Agnès Emery Par Agnès Emery”