Ribbon
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a narrow web of silk, satin, or velvet, finished on each edge with a cord or other fancy selvedge. A ribbon may be from three-sixteenths of an inch to eight or nine inches in width, although sash ribbons are often made much wider. Ribbons are made in endless variety. The weave may be plain, gros-grain, or figured. Different materials, as silk and velvet, may be combined in stripes or fancy designs. One color may be used or many colors combined in stripes, plaids, or figured effects. In their manufacture, a number of ribbons, even as high as forty, are woven side by side on the same loom. Factories fitted up for the manufacture of "rainbows" do no other weaving. The great ribbon-manufacturing center of the world is the silk-producing region of the Rhone. St. Etienne, France, is the greatest local center of the industry. There are 40,000 ribbon weavers in the city and vicinity. Lyons, a few miles farther up the Rhone; Basel, on the Rhine; Crefeld, Germany; Vienna, Austria; and Coventry, England, as well as Leicester and Norwich, are centers of the ribbon industry. Ribbon weaving was established at St. Etienne in the eleventh century. Ribbons used in the United States are mostly of domestic production. Paterson, New Jersey , is the center of the industry, although there are other flourishing factories in New Jersey, and in New York . The numbering of ribbons is an interesting feature of their preparation for market. The system in use arose in England and is in some way connected with English pence. It is supposed by some that the narrowest, No. 1, was sold originally for one penny, No. 2, for two pence, and so on. Perkins, in his Treatise on Haberdashery, says that No. 1 was the width of the old English penny edgewise, No. 2, the width of two pence, No. 3 of three pence, etc. The width in inches of the various numbers of ribbons in common use is as follows: No. 1, 3/16-inch; No. 1 1/2, 5/16; No. 2, 7/16; No. 3, 9/16; No. 4, 11/16; No. 5, 15/16; No. 7, 1 1/8; No. 9, 1 1/2 to 1 5/8; No. 12, 1 7/8 to 2; No. 16, 2 3/8; No. 22, 2 5/8 inches.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 account defines ribbon as "a narrow web of silk, satin, or velvet" and puts the industry's heart in the Rhone valley, with 40,000 weavers in and around St-Etienne. Silk has since given way almost entirely to man-made fibres — rayon, then nylon and polyester — and most ribbon is now woven on high-speed needle looms rather than the multi-web shuttle looms that carried forty ribbons side by side, or simply cut and heat-sealed from synthetic fabric. St-Etienne's trade collapsed over the twentieth century and survives largely as heritage, its looms preserved in the city's Musee d'Art et d'Industrie, while Paterson, New Jersey, lost its silk industry altogether. The penny-based numbering system Aiton explains at such length is gone from shops, where ribbon is sold by width in millimetres or inches; the most familiar ribbons today may be symbolic rather than decorative, such as the red AIDS-awareness loop adopted in 1991 and the pink breast-cancer ribbon that followed.
Written for this edition, 2026.