In celebration of Women’s History Month, March Object of the Day posts highlight women designers in the collection. Lia Cook’s creative process combines photographic media and computer-aided technologies with a mastery of hand and powered Jacquard looms. Her black-and-white work is based on scanned photographs, which are manipulated on a computer. Digital technology enables her...

In celebration of Women’s History Month, March Object of the Day posts highlight women designers in the collection. Origami Pleat was designed in 1997 by Reiko Sudo, one of Japan’s most important contemporary textile designers and co-founder of Nuno Corporation. The textile is a contemporary interpretation of centuries-old hand pleating. It is made by creating...

Venezuelan textile artists, Mariá Dávila and Eduardo Portillo describe their work as “driven by our relationship with our surroundings and how it can be communicated within a contemporary textile language.” Their hometown is Mérida, deep in the Andes Mountains, and like archaeologists they have been exploring this countryside for years, finding traces of human life...

Embossed Stainless Steel was designed by Reiko Sudo, one of Japan’s most important contemporary textile designers. Educated at Musashino Art University, she and Junichi Arai (Japanese, 1932–2017) were the co-founders in 1984 of the Japanese company and store, NUNO, which produces textiles of extraordinary ingenuity and beauty. Sudo and the other designers at NUNO combine...

One of the greatest challenges in designing commercial textiles has been creating durable, cleanable, affordable, and aesthetically pleasing fabrics for highly trafficked and 24/7 environments like healthcare facilities, theaters and airports. In addition, there is more demand for textiles with sustainable manufacturing practices, and companies like Designtex are taking on this responsibility and producing some...

Jamdani is a Persian term for the extremely fine hand woven figured muslins made in Bengal. Thicker cotton threads laid individually into the weft produce the illusion of a suspended pattern on the surface of an almost transparent cloth. Intricate color motives seem to float on the cloth. Jamdani is generally thought to have derived...

From the archives, an Object of the Day post on an example of iridescent design from the collection.

In celebration of Women’s History Month, March Object of the Day posts highlight women designers in the collection. Tsugihagi was designed by Reiko Sudo, one of Japan’s most important contemporary textile designers. Educated at Musashino Art University, she and Junichi Arai (Japanese, 1932–2017) were the co-founders in 1984 of the Japanese company and store, NUNO,...

In celebration of Women’s History Month, March Object of the Day posts highlight women designers in the collection. Cour de Rohan, which bears the name of Sheila Hicks’s home in Paris, is an example of the artist’s “macro-embroidery” process, a scaled-up version of the embroidery stitch known as point de couchage or point lancé et...