Sheridan on Vernus, _Art, luxe et industrie: Bianchini Férier: Un siècle de soieries lyonnaises_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (February 2008)

Pierre Vernus, _Art, luxe et industrie: Bianchini Férier, un siècle 
de soieries lyonnaises_. Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de 
Grenoble, 2006. 431 pp. ¤35 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-2-7061-0997-3.

Reviewed for EH.NET by George J. Sheridan, Jr., Department of 
History, University of Oregon.


The silk industry of Lyons is best known in history under two 
rubrics. The industry is a typical example of traditional specialized 
manufacture organized on the basis of putting out and remaining, well 
into the era of industrialization, wedded to both a decentralized 
business model and handicraft methods of production. Additionally, 
the Lyons industry was the site of uprisings and affiliated 
proto-union and social movements, in the years 1831-1834, that 
collectively bear the title of the "revolt of the _canuts_ [a popular 
term for silk weaver]," the first genuine working-class insurrection 
in history according to Friedrich Engels. It is in relation to the 
first of these two reasons for the celebrity of the Lyons silk 
manufacture that Pierre Vernus's study of the Bianchini Férier firm 
commands special interest.

Bianchini Férier (originally Atuyer Bianchini Férier) was created in 
1888 by three former employees of one of the city's renowned 
manufacturers of high fashion silks. Two of the three were from 
well-to-do Lyons families: Charles Bianchini, son of an Italian 
(Lombard)-born silk yarn merchant, and François Férier, son of a 
sales representative and related on his mother's side to a leading 
Lyons chemical manufacturer. The third partner, Pierre-François 
Atuyer, had more modest origins. On both his father's and mother's 
side, these were solidly _canut_, that is, he originated from the 
milieu of the silk weavers who had given Lyons its celebrity in the 
annals of the "revolt of the _canuts_." With a modest capital to 
which all three contributed equally and forming a partnership where 
the three shared full financial responsibility, they embarked on the 
manufacture and sale of the highest quality silk fabrics, the _haute 
nouveauté_. This was the sector of fabric manufacture most closely 
linked to Parisian high fashion dress design (_haute couture_, or 
_Couture_ for short). The enterprise was thus among the more risky, 
but benefited from a singular combination of the creative and 
entrepreneurial talent, the familial and commercial contacts, and the 
training and technical expertise brought to the group respectively by 
the three founders.

These assets positioned the firm for a strong start-up on a 
self-financing basis. From the outset it pursued a "double strategy" 
of integration on both manufacturing and commercial fronts. By 1914 
the enterprise included two weaving factories equipped with 
mechanical and hand-operated looms, another factory for silk throwing 
(yarn preparation), and a third for dyeing and cloth printing. On the 
commercial side it had a sales office in Paris, located in the Opera 
district and closely affiliated with leading fashion houses, and 
sales representatives and offices throughout Europe and America, 
including permanently staffed offices in London, Brussels, and New 
York. In the 1920s it added the production of artificial silk to its 
manufacturing activities and opened new sales outlets in Montreal and 
in South America. Its New York operation acquired a weaving factory 
at Port Jervis, New York, the Vaucanson Silk Mills Inc., to provide 
silk articles in particular demand on the American market without 
paying import duties. Such direct involvement in operations was 
exceptional among the Lyons silk manufacturers and proved to be a 
highly successful strategy for sustained profitability and 
investments financed from retained earnings well into the 1920s. The 
advantages of this integrated approach were evident especially in the 
firm's privileged access to Paris dress design. Intimacy with Paris 
_Couture_ insured that its _haute nouveauté_ products were taken up 
in each fashion season in advance of pattern imitations of those same 
fashions by competitors, notably on the American market. Its direct 
operations in weaving and finishing enabled the firm to meet the 
rigorous and fickle design specifications of its highly valued 
dressmaking clientele, with a rapidity of execution and a control of 
quality that would otherwise have been less feasible under the 
sub-contracting arrangements that were the norm in the industry.

This account of the early years of the firm's history highlights the 
first of three features that give Pierre Vernus' study interest 
beyond the particulars of one silk enterprise. The study illuminates 
the distinctive nature and workings of an entire industry that defies 
easy description, with an exceptional mastery of detail and clarity 
of presentation. Especially impressive is the treatment of the subtle 
interplays among high fashion, the decorative arts, and the technical 
possibilities for creative design and manufacture of fabrics, 
illustrated most vividly in Bianchini Férier's exclusive design 
contract with the renowned artist Raoul Dufy. On the side of 
production, the author provides a detailed description of technique, 
work process, plant layout and equipment, and labor recruitment for 
each of the firm's weaving, throwing, and finishing (dyeing and cloth 
printing) factories, and follows trajectories of capitalization and 
profitability in its manufacturing sector. The elaboration is most 
extensive for the 1920's, the best years of the enterprise. There is 
much to be learned, in short, about the workings of the 
twentieth-century Lyons silk industry in the broadest sense.

The second feature evoking larger interest in the study is the 
reading of great events, shocks, crises, and global transformations 
of a century of European economic history through the lens of a key 
player in a valued industrial sector. This amounts to an experience 
of that tumultuous century "writ small" in the conditions imposed on 
the firm and the decisions taken by it. For example, World War I 
accentuates difficulties of recruiting a skilled labor force for the 
firm's specialized manufacturing operations while turning its 
international marketing initiatives away from war-torn Europe and 
towards Argentina, initiating the postwar extension of its commercial 
network to South America. The 1930's and the Second World War 
challenge the carefully equilibrated integration of manufacture and 
commerce that had been the firm's special path to success. Assured 
profitability through foreign sales and exclusive contracts with high 
fashion designers, self-financed investments, _haute nouveauté_ 
production of fabrics using natural silk fibers, and certain 
manufacturing operations -- notably silk throwing -- are sacrificed 
or modified as enhanced protectionism, fragmented international 
markets, weak incomes, and, under the German Occupation, rigid state 
administration of the economy alter the more congenial industrial 
climate of the earlier years of the enterprise. The conditions of 
occupied France elicit tensions among firms of different sizes and 
reputations within the silk industry, and Bianchini Férier finds 
itself among the industry's "elites" favoring more coordinated and 
forward-looking responses over the resistance of small and 
medium-sized firms. In the era following World War II, the more 
democratized, youth-oriented consumer culture elicits a challenge of 
a very different sort. Ready-made fashions using artificial textile 
fibers compete with _Couture_ and force the _haute nouveauté_ into an 
ever narrowing market niche, the only place where the brand name of 
Bianchini Férier makes a difference. Competition at home and abroad 
from the new trend-setting "stylists," especially on the all 
important American market, reduces profit margins. These developments 
threaten the self-financing strategy of the enterprise over the long 
run and force major changes in company form and internal organization.

The third feature concerns the remarkable capacity of the firm to 
survive and even to thrive well into the twentieth century, as an 
essentially traditional form of enterprise. Ownership and structure 
remain within three, and after 1912 two, families, financed by a 
combination of retained earnings and capital drawn from family 
members. Only rarely and then in moments of exceptional crisis does 
the firm borrow from outside sources. This type of enterprise was the 
norm for flexible specialized production of highly differentiated 
products in the nineteenth century, especially in the luxury goods 
sector, even in the United States (Scranton 1997). The Bianchini 
Férier case stands out as exceptional for a context and a period when 
its viability would appear to be questionable. It illustrates a form 
of industrial enterprise that has been characterized as an 
"historical alternative." The historical alternatives approach to 
business strategy and business history has been conceptualized in 
terms of factors such as "economies of variety" enabling the rapid 
adjustment of volume and composition of output to ever changing 
demand conditions and manufacturing imperatives, and the adoption of 
"hedging strategies" to deal with uncertainty and contingency 
(Zeitlin 2003). These elements would seem to fit well Bianchini 
Férier's early decision to integrate towards both manufacturing and 
commercial poles of the _haute nouveauté_ sector and to make 
strategic adaptations at each end in response to emerging 
opportunities and new challenges. Through its permanent sales office 
in Paris, for example, it positioned itself at the point of maximum 
creative engagement in the market for its products, where high 
fashion, dressmaking, and the decorative arts converged. Through its 
silk throwing operation, at least initially, it inserted itself into 
the emerging sector of artificial silk, a move that enabled it to 
maintain a line of profitability amidst otherwise difficult times in 
the 1930s and after World War II. This study provides an unusually 
well-documented instance of an historical alternatives model of a 
modern industrial firm, with a fine sense of the enabling context for 
such a firm's longevity and success. The study would do well to 
articulate the logic of this firm's multiple strategies of adaptation 
in light of that model's theoretical concepts, along the lines 
undertaken, for example, for the putting-out silk manufactures of the 
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Poni 1997, Cottereau 1997).

This is an empirical business history that benefits from the author's 
vast knowledge of every aspect of the Bianchini Férier enterprise. 
That knowledge reflects the author's wide-ranging familiarity with 
and understanding of all the key elements of the industry of which 
Bianchini Férier was a part and of the business environment in which 
it first established its name and to which it subsequently adapted in 
creative ways as circumstances changed. It also reflects the 
unusually rich archival record of the firm's history, of the kind 
more commonly available, in French business history, for the sectors 
of banking, electricity, and automobile manufacture (Cassis 2003). 
The only other business histories of Lyons silk manufacture of note 
are a recently published monumental history of the family and silk 
enterprise of Claude-Joseph Bonnet (Pansu 2003) and an older master's 
thesis on the Lyons putting-out firm of Lamy Giraud (Charpigny 1981). 
Both of these concern primarily nineteenth- century cases. Pierre 
Vernus's study is the only twentieth-century business history for 
this industry and, in the empirical mode of such an undertaking, sets 
a high standard for future work.

References:

Cassis, Youssef. "Business History in France," in _Business History 
around the World_, eds. Franco Amatori and Geoffrey Jones. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 192-214.

Charpigny, Florence Patricia. "La Fabrique lyonnaise de soieries: Une 
maison à travers ses archives. De Lamy et Giraud à Lamy et Gautier, 
1866-1914." Mémoire de maîtrise, Université Lyon II, 1981.

Cottereau, Alain. "The Fate of Collective Manufactures in the 
Industrial World: The Silk Industries of Lyons and London, 
1800-1850," in _World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass 
Production in Western Industrialization_, eds. Charles F. Sabel and 
Jonathan Zeitlin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 
75-152.

Pansu, Henri. _Claude-Joseph Bonnet: Soierie et société à Lyon et en 
Bugey au XIXe siècle. Les assises de la renommée: Du Bugey à Lyon_. 
Lyon: Tixier, 2003.

Poni, Carlo. "Fashion as Flexible Production: The strategies of the 
Lyons Silk Merchants in the Eighteenth Century," in _World of 
Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western 
Industrialization_, eds. Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 37-74.

Scranton, Philip. _Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American 
Industrialization, 1865-1925_. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 
Press, 1997.

Zeitlin, Jonathan. "Productive Alternatives: Flexibility, Governance, 
and Strategic Choice in Industrial History," in _Business History 
around the World_, eds. Franco Amatori and Geoffrey Jones. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 62-80.


George J. Sheridan, Jr. is Associate Professor of History at 
University of Oregon (Eugene) and author of "Craft Technique, 
Association and Guild History: The Silk Weavers of Nineteenth-Century 
Lyon," in _Guilds and Association in Europe, 900-1900_, eds. Ian A. 
Gadd and Patrick Wallis (Centre for Metropolitan History, University 
of London, 2006): 147-168, and co-editor (with Evlyn Gould) of 
_Engaging Europe: Rethinking a Changing Continent_ (Rowman and 
Littlefield, 2005). Current work includes two book-length manuscripts 
on the silk industry in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Lyon, one 
focusing on silk weavers' associations and the other on fashion and 
fabrics, weaving technology, and social ideology.

Copyright (c) 2008 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be 
copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to 
the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the 
EH.Net Administrator (administrator at eh.net; Telephone: 513-529-2229). 
Published by EH.Net (February 2008). All EH.Net reviews are archived 
at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.