French textiles of the 17th century

The seventeenth century marks the definitive formation of a French silk industry in decisive competition with the Italian one, taken as a whole, it marks a period of decline in Italian textile art, because creative supremacy passes to the Lyon factories.

In the eighteenth century France holds the primacy in the field of textile creativity, more on the stylistic than on the technical side. Madame de Pompadour reigns supreme; the fashion of the time depends on her capricious will. She even gives her name to a characteristic style of textile decoration with scattered bunches of flowers; then, as a major shareholder of the Compagnie des Indes, she makes fashionable the small Chinese fantasies borrowed from imported porcelain. In ornamental styles, as in fashions and modes of dress, the eighteenth century is French in Italy just as the sixteenth century had been Italian in France.