Jacquard Fabric Stores

What a Jacquard Store Section Should Offer

A good retail jacquard section groups together fabrics whose raised design or pattern is woven into the fabric, as opposed to being printed on it, such as damasks, florals and geometrics. That definition, used by one of the stores below, is the shopper's test: turn the fabric over, and a true jacquard shows its pattern in the weave structure on the back as well. Within that family, a store may stock silk jacquard for garments, polyester jacquard for special occasions, and heavier upholstery and drapery jacquard, all under one heading.

Shop by end use first. Apparel jacquard must drape over a body and survive garment care; polyester jacquards, for example, are elegant for blouses, dresses, skirts and special occasion garments. Home jacquard must cover furniture and hang at windows, so weight, abrasion resistance and repeat size matter more than softness. Stores that sort jacquard by use, and state fiber, width and care for each bolt, save you from buying a beautiful upholstery cloth for a dress, or the reverse.

Four Retailers, Four Different Strengths

Fabric.com is a leading online fabric store, with many styles and colors of jacquard for draperies, duvets and slipcovers, and a history beginning as Phoenix Textiles Group in 1993 before going online in 1999 to sell cut yardage to consumers. Fashion Fabrics Club sells jacquard fabric by the yard at a discount, including silk jacquard, print jacquard, and upholstery and drapery jacquard, a breadth that suits a bargain-minded shopper comparing several types in one order.

Vogue Fabrics brings a different, physical scale. Since 1945 it has grown from a small fabric shop for dressmakers, opened by Sy Sussman and Sol Farber, into one of America's largest fabric stores, covering half a city block, with two other Chicagoland locations, two swatch catalogs, a wholesale division and its website, and offerings that change constantly, with color-coordinated match mates sometimes available. Warehouse Fabrics Inc specializes in home decorator fabrics; it is covered in the next section and in the listings below.

Jacquard for Rooms: the Decorator Angle

Warehouse Fabrics Inc specializes in home decorator fabrics and is one of the largest discount fabric stores in the Southeastern United States, in the designer fabric business since 1984, offering decorator fabric and trim at competitive prices. Its case for jacquard and damask is transformation: textiles can take a room from plain to spectacular, and the unique look of jacquard and damask sets a tone, formal and elegant or casual and relaxed, that other materials do not achieve the same way. That is a decorator's argument, pattern and texture doing work that paint cannot.

If your project is a room, weigh that angle seriously. Woven pattern tolerates daily light and touch better than many prints, tone-on-tone damask reads as texture rather than busy pattern in a small space, and a store specializing in decorator fabric is likelier to stock the widths, repeats and coordinating trims a drapery or upholstery project consumes. Ask such a store for its workroom or installer recommendations as well; local knowledge about who sews its fabrics well is part of what a regional specialist sells.

Buying Jacquard by the Yard Without Waste

Jacquard punishes careless yardage estimates. Pattern repeats must match at seams on garments and draperies, large motifs may need centering, and the fabric's direction, its nap or one-way design, can prevent turning pieces to save cloth. Give the store or workroom your finished dimensions and let them calculate with the repeat, or add a clear allowance yourself and say why. When a store notes that offerings change constantly, as Vogue Fabrics did, buy the full quantity in one order from one dye lot rather than planning a second purchase.

Use the wider Apparel Search fabric retail section when you need jacquard alongside other categories, and compare swatches from two stores before a large commitment when possible. Jacquard of the same fiber name can differ greatly in density and hand. The store whose swatch matches its delivered yardage, whose descriptions state fiber and width accurately, and whose staff can tell a damask from a brocade without guessing is the store that deserves your repeat business.

Jacquard Retailers Directory Listings

The four retailers are listed below, each with a short description of what it sells.