There is a moment, recurring and essential, at the heart of Carine Gilson's creative process, a piece of lace held up to the light, its patterns shifting, its threads whispering possibility. For the Belgian designer, lace is not simply an embellishment. It is the origin of everything.

Each collection at Maison Carine Gilson begins not with a sketch, not with a colour palette, but with a lace. A particular piece that catches her eye, stirs something in her, and unfolds an entire new world of silhouettes, textures and emotions.

Always named

What is perhaps most telling of Gilson's relationship with lace is the way she names each one. Not with technical references or catalogue numbers, but with the names of women. Women who have left their mark on history, on culture, on the imagination.

Ceres. Hanaé. Sissi. Loren. Sophia.

Each name carries its own mythology. Each lace, once named, becomes a character, a muse woven into the fabric of the house's history. These women are not chosen arbitrarily. They have inspired Gilson herself: transgressive figures and timeless icons, rebels and romantics, each one illuminating a different facet of femininity.

Transgression & tradition reunited

What gives these laces their particular power is the story they tell. Some are transgressive, pushing against convention, disrupting expectations. Others are resolutely classical, anchored in tradition, in the long history of French lace-making. But none are ever left untouched.

Every lace that enters the house is revisited. Gilson's hand is always present, recontextualising, reinterpreting, finding the contemporary within the historical, the intimate within the grand. A lace that was once worn at court becomes something worn close to the skin, as an urban elegance or for great occasions.

This is the Gilson paradox: the most refined luxury, rooted in the most fragile of crafts, yet worn as a second skin. The lace is never decorative for its own sake. It speaks. And in the name it carries, it speaks of a woman.