Saddle blankets — placed under the saddle to protect the horse from chafing and pressure from the saddle — continued to be used by the Navajo long after handwoven garments became impractical. By the 1950s, when this blanket was woven, the dramatic shoulder blankets for which the Navajo are famous were made far more frequently...

Mathilde Flögl was a prolific and multi-disiplinary designer at the Wiener Werkstätte. Her experience as a graphic designer translated well for much of the surface design she executed in wallcoverings, glass, ceramics and textiles. She created ceramic figurines, assisted Josef Hoffmann with the ornamental elements in his metal work and interiors, and designed lace patterns...

Jacqueline Groag was one of the United Kingdom’s most influential post-war textile designers. She began her career at the famed Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna before designing and producing hand-printed textiles for some of the top Parisian fashion houses, including Chanel, Lanvin, Worth, Schiaparelli, and Poiret. She was also one of only a few of the...

As the holidays draw near and decorations go up we begin to see the traditional hues of red and green, and their counterparts, silver and gold, appear around every corner. In accordance with this timing, it is appropriate to examine wallpapers that really exemplify this vein. Ceiling papers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth...

Many people try to play sheet music on the piano, but what about trying to play a drawing on the piano? The idea seems bizarre at first, but it’s central to a movement that began in the 1950s, where composers created “graphic scores” instead of typical sheet music. These graphic musical scores attempt to represent...

Folded into an open rhombus, and richly adorned with pigment, this brooch boldly uses color (achieved with the application of cobalt blue pigment) and texture (achieved by stippling the gold) to enhance its form. One look at this brooch by Giampaolo Babetto provides evidence of the mastery of gold present in his work. Babetto’s pieces cleverly...

In the 1960s, Heal Fabrics was London’s most avant-garde textile producer, and Barbara Brown was its most prominent designer. Trained at the Canterbury College of Art and the Royal College of Art, she began designing for Heal in 1958 and continued into the early 1970s. Brown’s distinctive style pioneered the fashion for bold geometric patterns...

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...