The Felixarchief, the archive of the City of Antwerp, brings together a series of beautiful flags from the Oyen-Soyez embroidery workshop in Borgerhout. Between 1906 and 1960, this workshop designed countless flags, not only for professional associations, but also for sports and music associations, youth movements, theatre groups, parishes, and religious brotherhoods. Most of the designs were created by Arthur Oyen himself.
The work of the studio was not limited to Antwerp, but extended far beyond, and offers a fascinating insight into associational life in Flanders in the last century.
Almost one-third of the designs are drawn on tracing paper, and in the case of the flag designs, often glued onto paper. However, embroidery patterns on tracing paper are very fragile due to the puncture holes from the tracing wheel used to transfer the pattern onto the fabric. To preserve the fragile originals optimally, the FelixArchief has made this special collection fully available digitally.
Take a look here: archive of the Oyen-Soyez embroidery studio.
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The FelixArchief is the archive of the City of Antwerp.
