Manufacture des Gobelins

The Manufacture des Gobelins began not with weavers, but with dyers. In the middle of the fifteenth century, the Gobelin family set up a workshop on the banks of the Bièvre River, which is now buried beneath the streets of the thirteenth arrondissement. They became famous for a specific, exceptionally intense scarlet dye that turned this once-smelly industrial suburb into a hub for luxury textile production. Their name became so synonymous with this craft that it survived for centuries, even after the family themselves stopped working the site.