Duralex Picardie

The Picardie is a short, heavy tumbler whose lower body is cut into flat facets and whose upper band is smooth, so the hand finds the facets and the lip finds the rim. It comes in several sizes and in clear glass and colours, and on French tables it is so ordinary that few people who drink from it know it has a name.

What makes it a Duralex is the tempering. The glass is pressed into a precision-milled mould, then heated to around 700°C, just below its softening point, and cooled fast with jets of air. The skin hardens and shrinks before the core, leaving the surface in compression; the company says the result is up to six times stronger than ordinary glass. If one does break, it breaks as tempered glass does, into small pieces rather than long shards.

The process was worked out in the 1930s by Saint-Gobain at a glassworks on the Loire just west of Orléans, and registered as Duralex in 1945, after the Latin maxim dura lex, sed lex: the law is hard, but it is the law. The stacking Gigogne tumbler came first and became the standard glass of French school canteens. The Picardie followed in 1954, with its faceted body, and is now in the design collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The company that makes it has had a hard modern history. Saint-Gobain sold it in 1997, and since then it has passed through several owners and a run of receiverships. Its furnaces were put on standby for five months over the winter of 2022 when energy prices soared, and in 2024 its employees took it over as a cooperative. Through all of it the Picardie has come off the same line, in the same factory that first made it.