If you have a good hi-res image of the collar laid flat on a single colour background you may consider the procedure I followed for some images in my gallery:

• shona girl collar
• crochet work collar

Both are simple single 'cloth' items textured with images I found in the open access collection of the Met museum. I rendered in Firefly using displacement and normal mapping from a de-saturated copy of the image, and transparency mapping via step functions. It takes a few tries to tune the shader but renders quite quickly.