I didn't know what to expect when I stepped off the plane in Dearborn, Michigan.
The Henry Ford Museum had invited me to a gala celebrating the opening of "Fabric of America," a new exhibition. My family's work and story had been selected for the collection. But honestly, I had only a vague idea of what the Henry Ford Museum actually was. I imagined something modest, maybe a room with a few restored Model Ts, the way the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart felt when I visited as a kid. I walked through that one in less than five minutes.
I was not prepared for what I found.
When I first drove into Dearborn, I felt the presence of Henry Ford before I understood it intellectually.
Statue of Henry Ford.
Colossal buildings bearing his name. Streets named after innovators, Carroll Shelby among them, whose contribution to American automotive history is impossible to overstate. I realized I was entering territory shaped by a single man's vision to preserve and celebrate American ingenuity.
The GT40, Carroll Shelby's work, the car that beat Ferrari at Le Mans.
Walking into the museum itself was like stepping into a time machine.
It wasn't a car museum. It was a cathedral of American manufacturing. Steam engines from the eighteen hundreds. Massive machinery from the late seventeen hundreds. Locomotives. Massive pulley wheels, each as tall as two or three people, precision engineered and installed without the aid of modern construction equipment or cranes. I found myself standing in front of these things, genuinely bewildered: how did they do this?
The scale you can only feel when you stand next to it.
I work with heavy machinery. One of my pleating machines weighs two tons. I understand the weight of precision equipment, the challenge of moving it, the care required to place it exactly right. But these machines, massive pulley wheels fitted into shafts with tolerances so tight they required absolute accuracy, were assembled in an era without power tools, without hydraulics, without the infrastructure we take for granted. There were no signs of force, no hammer marks, no stress fractures. Just perfect assembly.
Part of a steam engine, precision assembled by hand.
Standing in that room, surrounded by centuries of American innovation, I felt something I can only describe as awe. These weren't just objects. They were proof of what human beings could accomplish when they had to solve a problem with nothing but their own ingenuity.
One of the pulley wheels, twenty feet tall, installed without a single crane.
That feeling stayed with me as I explored the museum. Moving from one century to another in the same space, surrounded by the actual artifacts of American history, Lincoln's personal effects, the machinery that built a nation, the tools that shaped industries, there's an energy to it you cannot get from a photograph or a video. You have to be in the room. You have to stand in front of the thing itself.
The museum's philosophy became clear to me: Henry Ford understood that craftsmanship and innovation deserved to be remembered. He didn't just collect cars. He assembled a time capsule of American life itself. He preserved Edison's laboratory. He brought the Wright brothers' bicycle shop, the literal birthplace of aviation, to Dearborn. He recreated entire villages so people could walk through history, not just read about it.
One of Thomas Edison's workshops, preserved.
That's what Greenfield Village felt like. A time warp. Driving through in a Model T, passing the actual homes and workspaces of the people who changed America. You cannot communicate that experience secondhand. Seeing a picture of a work of art is nothing like standing in front of it. Being in the actual space where history happened, where these people lived and worked and invented, that's something else entirely.
The coal oven that powered Edison's workshop.
And then I walked into the "Fabric of America" exhibit.
The exhibit asks a simple but profound question: how much of your life is made of fabric? Your clothes. Your furniture. Your curtains. Your home. We live wrapped in fabric, yet most of us never think about the people who made it, the skill required, or why it matters.
The room was arranged like a conversation across centuries. Historical textiles that tell the story of American life and culture. Lincoln's presidential campaign flag. His top hat. Garments from the Battle of Versailles, the legendary 1973 fashion show that changed fashion history. Designers like Anne Klein, Halston, and Stephen Burrows were represented alongside works by Balenciaga and Dior.
And then, ten feet away from Abraham Lincoln's flag, I saw my family's pleated textiles on display.
I stood there for a long moment.
My pleats. My family's work. The techniques my father spent his life perfecting. The knowledge accumulated across five generations. All of it, acknowledged in the same breath as the defining moments of American cultural and manufacturing history, alongside the legacy of European masters.
Pleats my father and I made together, now in the museum.
I've spent the last two years relaunching Pierre Labiche with a single purpose: to ensure that my father and everyone in my lineage who dedicated their life to the craft of pleating are not forgotten. The hands that came before me, the standards they set, the knowledge they accumulated, it all matters. It deserves to be remembered.
Standing in that room, I understood that the Henry Ford Museum had done something I set out to do: they preserved craftsmanship. They said it matters. They said the people who make things deserve to be seen and remembered as part of America's story.
My family's work now lives in that museum permanently. Not as a relic of the past, but as proof that American craftsmanship, real craftsmanship, the kind that takes generations to master, is worth preserving for the future.
Words cannot express the eternal gratitude I have to the people at the Henry Ford Museum for including my family's story in this collection.
What the museum wrote about us.