Ep 122: Inside the life of a Textile Artist working in Haute Couture in Paris with Rebecca Devaney

Rebecca Devaney is a textile artist, researcher, and facilitator. She has recently established Textile Tours of Paris.

Rebecca Devaney first landed in Paris in 2017 to follow her dreams and study haute couture embroidery at the prestigious École Lesage. With a BA in Art and Design Education and an MFA in Textile Art and Artefact from the National College of Art and Design in Ireland, there were already two recurring themes in her life, embroidery and inspiring young people.

Before arriving in Paris, Rebecca was generously granted funding by the Thomas Dammann Junior Memorial Trust Award to undertake a research trip that aimed to investigate the cultural importance, craft, and aesthetic of Mexican hand embroidery. She traveled all over Mexico to meet craftspeople, artists, ethnographers, and anthropologists to study how embroidery is heavily embedded in their culture. She heard how women embroider their personal stories, memories, and experiences in each beautiful piece of work. Her research resulted in the exhibition Bordados, a collection of photographs, interviews, and textiles, which has been presented internationally and is now part of the permanent collection at the Mexican Consulate to France.

Rebecca is also a textile artist and her work has been exhibited in Ireland, the United States, and even here in Paris at the OECD inaugural conference on Violence Against Women. She has completed artist residencies in Abu Dhabi and India, teaching children how to combine creativity and sustainability to create beautiful works of art. She is currently working with Fanatikart in Paris, teaching young children to use embroidery to tell their stories, which will be exhibited at Centre 104. She had always dreamed of incorporating the embroidery and embellishment techniques of haute couture in her textile art practice. Enrolling in École Lesage was her opportunity to do this, to learn the techniques mastered – and, in some cases, invented – by one of the world’s greatest artistic embroidery houses. 

She spent six months training in the intricate arts of Lunéville embroidery, traditional needlework, and embellishment. After qualifying, Rebecca began working as an embroiderer for the world’s most renowned Maisons de Haute Couture such as Chanel, Dior, Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Dolce and Gabanna, Louis Vuitton, and Valentino. She embroidered gowns for celebrities and royalty worn at the Met Gala Ball, Cannes Film Festival, and of course, Paris Fashion Shows, you could say, she was living the embroider dream life. 

Rebecca established Textile Tours of Paris in 2019 to share her love of the rich heritage of textiles woven through the fabric of Paris on guided walking tours. She also runs embroidery workshops and the Threads of Connection embroidery evenings at Shakespeare & Company. 

All of those experiences and passions would soon collide when Rebecca was working with the Irish in France at the Irish Cultural Centre to create children’s costumes from recycled materials for the St Patrick’s Day Parade in Paris in 2020. She was approached by Junk Kouture, a fashion competition founded in Ireland in 2010, which was planning to expand internationally. She knew the competition well from when she worked as an Art teacher in Dublin and had participated each year with her students who absolutely loved it. Rebecca loved the idea of bringing Junk Kouture to the home of Haute Couture!

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