Carine Gilson

Belgian designer Carine Gilson has made couture lingerie by hand in Brussels since 1990, when she took over a small underslip workshop and turned it into the atelier that carries her name. Her house, Carine Gilson, is known for one technique above all: Chantilly lace cut from its net and inlaid into silk.

Two fine arts academies, then an underslip workshop

Gilson was born in Brussels and studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, the school that produced the Antwerp Six. Lingerie came by chance. She discovered Maille France, a small Brussels atelier that made underslips, and took it over. French sources date her own ateliers to 1990, and the house marked thirty years with an exhibition in 2019.

The starting point shaped the work. An underslip is cut on the bias and has to hang close to the body without pulling. Those are dressmaking problems. Gilson's pieces have always looked more like couture dresses scaled down than like the engineered bra sets of the big French lingerie firms.

Inlaid Chantilly: the Carine Gilson technique

The method is called lace incrustation. Lace motifs are cut away from their net, laid on silk, stitched down by hand, and then the silk underneath is trimmed away so the lace becomes part of the garment's surface rather than a trim along its edge. The house calls hand-cut Chantilly its DNA.

The figures it publishes give a sense of the labor. About 4.8 meters of silk go into a kimono. Some 484 pins position the lace on a single underdress. Around 18,000 meters of lace are inlaid each year, and no design is made in more than about 100 pieces. Prototypes are made straight in silk, because a cotton toile drapes differently and would mislead the cutter. For the thirtieth anniversary the house developed an exclusive lace, Intemporelle, with the French lacemaker Sophie Hallette.

Earlier versions of this page said every piece was cut from Calais lace. The house's own material names Chantilly lace and the Sophie Hallette design, so the Calais claim is dropped here.

Paris before Brussels

Gilson opened her first boutique in Paris, in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, in 2004. A Brussels shop followed in 2010, then London in 2012, Taipei in 2015 and a second Brussels address in 2018. That a Belgian couture house went to Paris first says plenty about where the customers for hand-inlaid silk were.

Her clients have included Madonna, Angelina Jolie and Rihanna, and the house made pieces for film, among them a kimono for the James Bond film Skyfall. In 2009 her collection was on the runway at Lingerie Miami, a charity show for the Seven Bar Foundation, alongside Agent Provocateur.

Lace in the museum

In 2016 the Victoria and Albert Museum in London showed her work. In 2019 the Musee Mode & Dentelle in Brussels, the city's fashion and lace museum, staged "Beautiful Lace & Carine Gilson" for the house's thirtieth year. For a designer working in the country of Brussels and Mechelen lace, the venue was a natural fit, and it placed a living lingerie maker in a museum usually given over to historical lace.

Last updated October 7, 2026