Musée des Tissus et des Arts Décoratifs

This guide to the Musee des Tissus et des Arts Decoratifs in Lyon starts with the silkworm itself, tracing how its unbroken thread built the city's silk economy long before it filled a museum. It follows Lyon's manufacturers to the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, where they came home empty-handed, and to the Chamber of Commerce's 1856 decision to answer that humiliation with a collection instead. From there it moves into the eighteenth-century mansion that has housed the museum since, and the textiles gathered inside it over a century and a half.