5804 29 00: Tulles and other net fabrics, not including woven, knitted: mechanically made lace, of other textile materials

See the HS Explanatory Note to heading 5804, (II).

See the HS Explanatory Note to subheadings 5804 21, 5804 29 and 5804 30 for the distinction between handmade lace and mechanically made lace.

Care should be taken to ensure that knitted fabric closely resembling lace, and in fact sold as lace in the trade, is not classified in heading 5804. Such fabric is manufactured on Raschel machines and may be recognised from the fact that the openwork is formed by the intersection of meshes resembling warp knitting and not by warp threads (straights) and weft threads (slants).

For the filling of the opaque spaces of the design, the thread used is inserted in the meshes which form the sides of the small hexagons of the openwork where it is held in place by a type of chain stitch. The openwork does not therefore cease where the design begins; on the contrary, it forms the support for it (which is not always the case in mechanically made lace).

The indications given in the HS Explanatory Note to subheadings 5804 21, 5804 29 and 5804 30 which enable mechanically made lace to be recognised are also valid for Raschel ‘lace’: meshes or parts of meshes remain after cutting into strips, the flow of the outline threads and design threads, and the mechanical regularity of any defects, etc.

Nevertheless, for the purposes of the Combined Nomenclature, lace obtained from a Raschel machine is regarded as knitted and must therefore be classified in Chapter 60.

Fabric imitating point lace (guipure) which has been produced in the same way as chemical embroidery is not classified as mechanically made lace and falls in heading 5810.