Throughout March, Object of the Week celebrates Women’s History Month. Each Monday a new post will highlight women designers in the collection. Does capturing the malevolent and mysterious quality of Rodarte’s fashions in contract fabrics sound like the impossible brief? Then extra credit is due to this collaboration among former National Design Award winners Rodarte...

In the aftermath of World War II, a number of textile producers attempted to revitalize the industry by enlisting recognized personalities in art and architecture to design screen prints. “Perhaps the most outstanding name collection is Stimulus Fabrics produced by Schiffer Prints,” Alvin Lustig wrote in American Fabrics Magazine in 1951. “There was not a...

Remoulade developed out of a hand-woven wall hanging Jack Lenor Larsen made during the summer of 1954 at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine, where he remains an Honorary Chair. The original hanging, a weft-faced weave, used over seventy different yarns, including cotton, silk, wool, jute, and Lurex, inserted randomly, to create a richly...

Sandy Chilewich has popularized and boosted the reputation of extruded yarn manufacture, specifically in vinyl, which used to be reserved for more industrial applications. She took advantage of a fairly simple mechanical process involving relatively few steps to make much of the woven vinyl products that are part of her eponymous line. The extrusion process...

Along with Bright Grid and Bright Angle, Bright Cube is the second series of products designed by Dutch designers, Stefan Scholten (b. 1972) and Carole Baijings (b. 1973) of Scholten & Baijings in collaboration with Maharam. Their first, Blocks and Grid, is in Cooper Hewitt’s collection. Scholten & Baijings’s work is characterized by minimal forms...

Manufactured by Dedar, the furnishing fabric Present Perfect has the visual qualities of a hand-embroidered textile, with its asymmetrical and punctuated patterning, but it is a jacquard-woven fabric that plays with texture and light. The abstract composition of geometric shapes realized with yarns of different thicknesses, colors, and material is distinctive against the jute and...

During World War II, commercial construction in the United States came to a standstill, but Dorothy Draper received a plum commission to design the interiors of Cassino Hotel Quitandinha, in Petrópolis, a mountain resort outside Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, designed by Italian architect Luis Fossatti and constructed by entrepreneur Joaquim Rolla. At the time it...

Witold Gordon was a Polish-born artist perhaps best known for his illustrations of regional architecture and typography, which were shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the exhibition “American Scene” in 1941. New York’s idiosyncratic storefronts were the inspiration for a series of New Yorker covers in the 1940s. Shell Chest was Gordon’s...

In celebration of Women’s History Month, March Object of the Day posts highlight women designers in the collection. Knoll Luxe was launched in 2008 as a luxury fabric division of Knoll Textiles. The brand utilizes a global network of specialized and highly skilled textile mills to realize fabrics that combine classic modernism with a strong...

In 1965, Jack Lenor Larsen made the first of sixteen trips to Ireland at an invitation from the Irish Export Board to develop fabrics for interiors. Using a mill specializing in worsted wool and a Donegal handweaving operation, he produced worsted damasks and tweed and satins with vegetable-dyed screen prints, which make up his 1969...

Alexander Girard (American, 1907–1993) was one of the leading American textile designers of the mid-century period, and was a strong proponent of bringing an affordable modernism to the middle class. Girard was the head of the Textile Division of Herman Miller Inc. from 1952 to 1973, where he worked alongside Charles and Ray Eames and...

Fresco is a hand-drawn and -painted textile created by a team of Indian calligraphers. Formerly employed to paint cinema billboards, these painters now produce craft fabrics. The uniqueness of each textile is only discernible under close scrutiny, when one notices slight variations of lines and the occasional stray ink marks. This overall consistency of application...

In all of the many areas of design Gere Kavanaugh has tackled, from commercial interiors and exhibitions to furniture, textiles and wallcoverings to typefaces to toys, she is noted for her vibrant use of color and sense of play. She is inspired by folk art, and co-curated the exhibition “Home Sweet Home: American Domestic Vernacular...

Now on view in The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s, this Dufy textile proclaims modernity in its abstracted pattern.

This fashionable textile's fountain motif can now be seen in The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s.