THE LACE PRINCIPLE
A piece of lace is made of two things: thread, and the deliberate absence of thread.
Hold it to the light and you will see only the pattern – the rose, the leaf, the initial worked into the corner – and you will assume, as almost everyone assumes, that the lace is the thread. It is not. The thread only describes the absence. The absence is the lace.
For four hundred years, the women of one small town in Devon understood this without needing to say it aloud, because they had spent their whole lives being the thread that traced the outline of someone else’s idea of what a woman should be – visible exactly where permission allowed it, and invisible, deliberately, everywhere else.
This is the history of what they left out, on purpose, until the absence itself became a shape worth wearing.
You will be tempted, reading what follows, to look for these women in what was recorded of them. Look instead at what wasn’t recorded. That is where they actually lived.
I.
Mayfair, 1922
No one in Honiton ever called it the lace trade. They called it the work, the way you might call breathing the breathing – not a profession so much as a condition of having been born a girl in a town where the rain came in sideways and the men were mostly out with the sheep. For four hundred years the daughters of this small, damp fold of Devon sat at a window with a pillow of stuffed cloth between their knees, turning linen thread into the shape of what wasn’t there: the rose defined by the hole at its centre, the leaf that existed only because the thread around it had agreed, deliberately, to stop.
Two of those daughters, born within two years of each other in farmhouses half a mile apart, would eventually leave Devon for a rented room in Mayfair and put their names to something neither could have explained to her mother over breakfast. Katherine Hartwell and Iris Vane did not set out to found anything. They set out, as their grandmothers had with thread, and their grandmothers’ grandmothers before that, to describe an absence precisely enough that someone would mistake it for a presence.
The rest, as it tends to, followed from that.
Date stone at 8 Hay Hill, Mayfair, cut in Latin, the only founding year Kitty Hartwell and Iris Vane ever agreed to, 1922 – from the Kitty’s archives.
II.
Life in the Lanes
Devon does not make anything easy, least of all a living. The chalk soil resists the plough. The lanes flood by November and don’t drain again until March. A family here could not survive on wheat and wool alone, so it did what families in hard, narrow places have always done – it put its idle hours to work, and in Honiton, the idle hours belonged almost entirely to the women.
Flax, for thread. Bone, for bobbins. Candlelight, for the evenings the fields had nothing left to offer. What the soil withheld, the lace pillow returned – in a currency no husband or father could easily confiscate, because it was made of nothing he could see the value in until it was finished. A wage earned, quite literally, in the gaps no one else thought to look in.
It was, by the 1700s, a skill men needed and could not replicate, which is its own quiet kind of power. It led, before long, to something considerably less respectable. Within a generation, the hands that made Honiton famous for honest lace would make one Hartwell woman rather famous for the other kind.
Katherine ‘Kitty’ Hartwell (1898–1974), co-founder of Kitty’s, in Honiton before London had heard of her, c.1916 – from the Kitty’s archives.
III.
The Stolen Trade
In 1761, a farmer’s daughter named Susannah Hartwell left Honiton for London at nineteen, intending to learn what the Lace Merchants’ Company guarded like scripture and shared, as a rule, with no woman at all.
She lasted eighteen months. The guild extended credit to its sons and rarely to anyone else, and Susannah ran out of money long before she ran out of intent. What the records don’t explain is how she came home not empty-handed but in possession of techniques the Company had spent a century protecting – until a former guildsman named Augustus Pell confessed, decades later, in a letter to his niece, that he had taught her everything he knew in the hope of marrying her, and that she had thanked him by opening a workroom of her own and never once raising the subject again.
She had learned, before she’d learned much else, that the surest way to obtain a closely guarded thing is to let a man believe he is the one giving it. She taught the technique forward without attaching her name to the lesson – which is, on reflection, the oldest tradition this family has ever kept, though it would take another century before anyone noticed that not all silences are the same kind.
Fitting note to Mrs Ashworth from 8 Hay Hill, in which Miss Hartwell will see you herself, c.1926 – object scan, from the Kitty’s archives.
IV.
Par la Main
Some families keep their history in portraits. The Hartwells kept theirs in a drawer. Susannah’s granddaughter, Eliza, treasured a single length of point lace no wider than a finger, worked in secret the winter her grandmother came home from London with a broken guildsman’s heart and a trade he hadn’t known he was giving away.
It was never sold, never worn, never shown – which is to say, it existed in the family exactly the way the women themselves so often did: present, intact, and almost entirely unrecorded.
It survived fires, two house moves, and a grandmother who nearly burned it by accident and never forgave herself. It belonged, for a time, to Margot Hartwell-Vane, former Creative Director of Kitty’s and a direct descendant of both founders, who finally had it framed – after two centuries in drawers – for the wall above the Mayfair atelier. It now keeps its place in a different drawer, in different hands, the house having long since learned that blood was never the only qualification. Proof, if anyone still required it, that in this family the smallest things have always outlasted the largest ones.
Tissue bearing the Kitty’s Mayfair stamp, guardian of the 1763 lace fragment through two centuries of drawers – object scan, from the Kitty’s archives.
V.
First in Fold
In 1567, fleeing religious persecution in Flanders, a young lacemaker named Margriet de Wilde crossed the Channel with nothing but her bobbins and the patterns held in memory, and settled near Honiton, where she married a farmer named Thomas Hartwell and gave the family a technique no Englishwoman yet possessed.
It was her great-great-granddaughter, Lavinia, who gave the family its reputation. Widowed in the winter of 1783 – fever took her husband and two sons within a fortnight – she found herself with three children, no income, and a parish offering sympathy but no actual money. So by day she taught lace, as her family always had, and by night she ran contraband French point past the excise men on the Beer coast road, selling what they couldn’t intercept and, by most accounts, occasionally selling word of the smugglers to the excise men too, whichever side happened to be paying better that month.
History prefers its smugglers villainous and its widows pure. Lavinia had the inconvenience of being neither, which is perhaps why the parish remembered her unkindly, and why the family remembers her at all.
Madder-dyed cloth in which Lavinia Hartwell wrapped smuggled French point, Beer coast road, c.1790 – object scan, from the Kitty’s archives.
VI.
New Horizons
Which of Lavinia’s sons truly carried the trade forward is disputed even now. The likeliest account names her youngest, Edmund, apprenticed at nine to his mother’s circle of lacemakers – though family legend insists he learned just as much from the Vane boy next door, a friendship that would outlast both of them and several generations after.
In 1809, Edmund married Charlotte Vane, the first recorded union between the two families and certainly not the last. Her dowry bought him a proper workroom – the first to carry the Hartwell name alone rather than the looser arrangements of the parish – and he sent his own children as far as London and Paris to learn what Honiton couldn’t teach: the cutting, the mounting, the considerable art of persuading a wealthy stranger to pay for something they didn’t strictly need.
It was a modest ambition with outsized consequences: not merely to fill the gaps in linen thread, but to fill the gap, finally, between a woman’s hands and a woman’s name.
Working notes from Mrs Marbury’s second fitting, persuasion practised by hand, Hay Hill, c.1927 – object scan, from the Kitty’s archives.
VII.
By Morning
By the 1820s, the Hartwell workroom coordinated lace from dozens of cottages across the parish, each paid by the piece, each more or less sworn to silence about whose hands had actually made the lace that left Devon under someone else’s name.
In 1840, that lace – or lace exactly like it – trimmed the wedding gown of a young Queen Victoria, and Honiton’s reputation as the finest lace town in England was made by morning. Victoria walked the aisle of Westminster Abbey without once wondering whose winter it had cost her. That, perhaps, is the truest definition of luxury this family ever encountered: a beauty so complete that no one thinks to ask what it required, or of whom.
Between 1830 and 1860, the Hartwell workroom grew into the largest in the parish. On Saturdays, women queued at the kitchen door with the week’s work wrapped in cloth, lowering their voices so as not to wake the children – the workroom, by necessity, passed straight through the family’s own bedroom to reach the street, the business of lace and the business of sleep having shared a wall for as long as anyone could remember.
The Hay Hill desk at which Honiton’s finished work was received, recorded, and sent out under another name, c.1926 – from the Kitty’s archives.
VIII.
The Prodigy
Eliza’s son was christened Theodore in 1853, most likely in honour of Honoré Beaumont, the Continental lace designer who died that same spring after forty years teaching Honiton’s pattern-cutters techniques the French had no intention of sharing freely.
Theodore apprenticed under his aunt, the parish’s first female churchwarden – a post that scandalised exactly the people she’d hoped it would – and learned from her both the craft and a taste for doing things others considered improper. He worked for the family and, eventually, for himself, exhibiting at the Devon County Show in 1881 and winning a medal the official record credits to him alone.
It was not, strictly, his to claim. The piece had been finished almost entirely by his sister Henrietta, barred from exhibiting under her own name that year by a rule the Show abandoned not long after. Theodore accepted the medal in front of the crowd, corrected nothing in public, and split the prize money with her quietly that same evening – a private justice, the only kind available to either of them, and the same family habit Susannah had practised a century earlier, though this time the silence was not chosen. It was imposed. The two would not be confused again.
The Devon County Show refuses Henrietta Hartwell’s entry under her own name, the imposed silence, 1889 – object scan, from the Kitty’s archives.
IX.
Born in Lace
Iris Vane was born in February 1900, the same week Theodore Hartwell finally retired from a trade he had spent thirty years defending, and once, at least, taking too much credit for.
She grew up at a table thick with talk: London clients, a Russian grand duchess who’d ordered an entire trousseau in Honiton point, an American heiress who paid in dollars nobody local had ever actually seen. Her father finished the most delicate pieces himself, with a repairer’s patience few men in the trade could match.
At nineteen she married well, by everyone’s reckoning but her own, and moved to Bath. Her husband considered lacework unbecoming of his wife and said so until, one evening, he settled the matter – in his own mind – by burning a basket of her patterns in the drawing-room grate. He mistook the burning of paper for the burning of an idea, a mistake the men in this family’s history make with some regularity: assuming that because a thing can no longer be seen, it has ceased to exist. He had, if anything, only clarified the pattern further. He had burned it down to the parts of her that mattered, which were never on the paper to begin with. Iris came home to Devon that winter with a trunk and, for the first time in her life, no one left whose permission she required.
What her husband’s fire left of Iris Vane’s patterns, the parts that mattered never on paper, c.1919 – object scan, from the Kitty’s archives.
X.
A Friendship
The Hartwells and Vanes had been tangled together for over a century before either Kitty or Iris was born – by marriage, apprenticeship, shared workrooms, shared Saturdays. The two girls simply inherited a friendship already in motion, the way one inherits a clock that was running long before anyone taught them to read its face.
It was not, despite what later accounts imply, an easy or unbroken one. The two quarrelled badly in 1915, over money neither of them had and a man neither of them, in the end, wanted, and did not speak for the better part of a year. What ended the silence was not an apology. It was the telegram that came for Iris’s brother Robert in July 1916. Kitty arrived the same afternoon, said almost nothing useful, and stayed three days regardless.
Some of the most important things this family ever made were made in silence – lace, mostly, but also, that July, a friendship repaired not by speech but by simply showing up and staying. The first thing either woman made entirely for love rather than money was a small handkerchief, Robert’s initials worked into the corner. It still exists. It is, by any honest accounting, the true first object of what would become Kitty’s – built not from ambition, but from the particular quiet that follows a quarrel nobody quite finished having.
Sketch in lipstick by Terence Donovan, a gift to his friend Kitty Hartwell at Brown’s Hotel, c.1970 – from the Donovan Bar, Mayfair.
XI.
Kitty’s
By 1925, drafting notices for their first private clients, Kitty and Iris had to settle on a date their company began, and they hesitated, because the honest answer was that it hadn’t – not on any single day a person could point to.
Liberal, slightly reckless, post-war London required nothing of two women before they simply started doing the thing. No register, no patent, no announcement to anyone. Only the work, and a small but growing number of women willing to pay quietly for it.
Kitty’s began in a bedroom in Mayfair on a grey February morning that London has long since forgotten. She had not slept. There was champagne nobody had finished, and a fire that somebody had. There was lace on the floor – real lace, the kind that takes a woman in Honiton three weeks to make by hand – and pearls on the bedside table, and a second coat over the back of the chair that no record this family kept has ever named. Outside the window, England went about its business, entirely unaware that something had just been decided.
She decided it the way she decided everything. No announcement. No proclamation. Simply the absolute, unshakeable certainty of a woman who has just understood something true about the world and intends to build her life around it. A small notice ran that December, three lines, easy to miss unless you already knew what to look for: ‘LACE & FINE THINGS – a discreet selection, by appointment only – K. Hartwell, Hay Hill, Mayfair.’
‘The Absence,’ first campaign of the 2007 rebranding under creative director Margot Hartwell-Vane, shot on film – from the Kitty’s archives.
XII.
Against All Odds
What began on a Devon lace pillow has become a hundred years of women declining, politely but completely, to be told what was appropriate. Kitty’s remains today exactly what it was on that February morning: held closely, made by hand, and entirely uninterested in anyone’s permission.
Anastasia Romanova leads the house now, and on paper she is everything the founders were not: a supermodel before she was anything else. She spent a decade being looked at for a living, which is perhaps why she understands the house better than any bloodline could – no one knows more about what a woman chooses to show, and what she deliberately withholds, than someone whose entire career depended on the difference. Discretion was never really the point. It was the costume the work wore in public. Underneath it, the point was always freedom.
Anastasia keeps the photograph from that February morning in the same drawer as the point lace fragment the Hartwells protected since 1763. It was taken years later, by someone who wasn’t there, and it shows an empty bedroom rendered ordinary: a window, a fireplace, a chair with nothing on it. She has never tried to identify the coat that isn’t in it. She has come, over time, to understand why she shouldn’t.
A piece of lace is made of two things: thread, and the deliberate absence of thread. The Hartwell women have always known which one was the lace.
Written on the glass of a chalet above Gstaad, a declaration of love from Anastasia Romanova to Lucius Czerlau – from his iPhone, February 2026.