Schumacher Acquires a 150 Year Old Belgian Textile Mill's Archive

American design house F. Schumacher & Co. has acquired the vast majority of archival materials recovered from Vanoutryve, a defunct textile mill in southern Belgium, as first reported by Business of Home. Founded in Roubaix, France in 1860 by Felix Vanoutryve, the mill operated for more than 150 years and later expanded into Belgium, contributing to the European textile industry through the art nouveau and art deco periods and collaborating with figures including fashion designer Paul Poiret.

The acquisition carries personal resonance for Schumacher. Frederic Schumacher worked as a textile agent for Vanoutryve in the United States and France before founding his own New York design house in 1889, and the company still produces Parrots Moderne, a fabric originally woven by the mill. Vanoutryve closed its doors in 2019, and its archive sat largely undisturbed until the mill's owner, a friend of the founding family, approached Schumacher about a sale roughly a year and a half ago.

Recovered from the mill and a barn in the Bordeaux region of France, the archive totals more than 75,000 textile samples across 1,500 swatch books, with original fabrics and drawings dating from 1870 to 1960. The volumes span modernist art deco motifs, classic Persian patterns and traditional florals, organized by year into what Schumacher's team describes as a time capsule of shifting design tastes. Transporting the collection required two shipping containers, and documents were frozen for 30 days on arrival as a precaution against pests.

Schumacher's archivists expect the restoration process to take two to three years, after which the Vanoutryve materials will be folded into the company's existing archive at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Plans for the collection include its use as an industry resource for education, potential traveling exhibitions and site tours for designers and students, and possibly a future collection reviving some of the original designs. "It's part of our soul and our spirit," Schumacher CEO Timur Yumusaklar said of the acquisition.

More on the company is available through Schumacher.