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.

A series of wool fabrics in saturated, oversized plaid is Designtex’s most recent collaboration with Harriet Wallace-Jones and Emma Sewell of the British textile studio Wallace Sewell (already represented in Cooper Hewitt’s collection with a blanket). The large-repeat stripes and grids are inspired in part by Bauhaus textile artist Anni Albers and in part by...

In composition, Kaleidoscope closely resembles Larsen’s famous design of concentric squares, Magnum. But whereas that design was machine-embroidered around mirror-like squares of Mylar, Kaleidoscope is a durable, hard-wearing upholstery in a technique called epinglé velvet – so named for the wires which are inserted into the shed during the weaving and over which the pile...

Alexander Hayden Girard made an indelible (and colorful!) impact on 20th century modernist textile design. At the helm of Herman Miller’s textiles division, his playfulness provided a warm complement to the stark simplicity of furniture designs of Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson. As its title suggests, Ribbons features overlapping, irregular vertical rectangles reminiscent...