In Vienna, where once there were dozens of manufacturers, today there is one. The craft has not disappeared, because the clients who depend on it have not disappeared either.
Every army still needs its epaulettes, every fire brigade its cord, every church its vestments, every civic association its sashes and rosettes, every theatre its curtain trim. The institutions that require visible hierarchy have simply continued to require it, quietly and consistently, regardless of whether the trade serving them was fashionable or forgotten.
Passementerie survived not because it reinvented itself for a new market but because certain human needs, the need to mark rank, to signal belonging, to make authority visible and ceremony legible, proved more durable than the industry built around them.
What looks like a niche craft is, on closer inspection, the material infrastructure of institutional life.
image credit: M. Maurer