"Imagine a time...when color and texture played no part in fabrics, when, as Jack Lenor Larsen put it 'the insipid pale tints of the depression prevailed.' It would take a pioneering spirit to experiment with new materials and daring color
Textile design
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A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes is on view at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. I had the thrill of seeing it recently, along with Jade Papa, our curator. Like many textile enthusiasts, I'd been anticipating
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When I'm not working at the Design Center, I sometimes help out at the Gutman Library circulation desk. A major perk of that job is being able to browse the world-class fashion and textile book collection. About a year ago, while checking in
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Recently, I’ve worked to bring to light hundreds of trims and ribbons that have been stored away in the collection. As I went through the boxes and boxes of these pieces, the vibrant colors and patterns instantly caught my eye. For this blog
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Before computer-aided design, the work of the textile print designer was all done by hand. Designs intended for repeating patterns were hand-sketched and painted. This age of pre-digital textile design is documented in the Point Papers
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Part of what makes cataloging our pieces so interesting is learning about designers who may not have big name recognition, but nevertheless made significant and often underrated contributions to textile and fashion design. One such designer who
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This summer, I tackled a project that quickly turned into an obsession. The task was to inventory our collection of American Fabrics magazines, consisting of 116 issues that date from 1947 to 1986. It’s an incredible collection of primary
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Did you know that as part of our collection we hold tens of thousands of fabric swatches dating back to the seventeenth century? Well, now you can check out some of these swatches on our new and improved website Tapestry.
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Tammis Keefe, one of the great names of handkerchief and textile design, was born in 1913 in California. Initially studying higher mathematics at Los Angeles Community College, she decided to change her major to painting at the Chouinard
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In the realm of fashion and textiles, things that possess a quality or feature that is extremely impressive tend to spark conversation. Creativity and innovation thrive in fashion, which can be translated through design. Presentation is the