Junichi Arai is one of the world’s foremost innovators in textile design. He was born in Kiryu, Japan, an important center for textile production with over 1,000 years of silk-making tradition. As the sixth generation of a mill-owning family, Arai learned at an early age the customary Japanese weaving techniques for obis and kimonos. However,...
Hans Krondahl is an important Swedish textile designer and fiber artist of the 1960s and 70s. Krondahl graduated from the National College of Art, Craft and Design in Stockholm in 1959. He opened his own studio in 1962, designing both large-scale tapestries for public environments as well as designs for industrially printed textiles. He was...
Often called “England’s Eamses,” Robin and Lucienne Day were a designing couple utterly committed to modernism. The unexpectedness and vitality of their postwar interior furnishings, particularly Lucienne’s pattern designs for textiles, carpets, wallcoverings, and dishware, shaped the look of modern England in the 1950s. Lucienne is rightfully famous for Calyx, the organic design inspired by the work...
The Lindy Hop was a swing dance phenomenon, but the Finnish Hop? This lively design was produced by the artists’ collective know as The Folly Cove Designers, for its location near Gloucester on the Massachusetts coast. Many Finnish immigrants had settled there, attracted by skilled work in the granite quarries or the boat building industry....
Art et Decoration, November 1926 Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay, which opened March 18, brings over 300 examples of the artist’s fashion and textile designs to our galleries. Here are a few fun things that were not included, but can all be found in Smithsonian’s National Design Library, housed here at Cooper-Hewitt....
A small group of Cooper-Hewitt Members had the special privilege of going on an installation tour of Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay. In the galleries, geometric prints popped with color and movement. Members previewed gorgeous gouache on paper and finished fashion pieces—embroidered swimsuits and a coat made for silent film star Gloria...
Textile design #253 from Sonia Delaunay, 1928-30. Gouache, ink, and pencil on paper. Private collection © L & M SERVICES B.V. The Hague 20100623 Photo: © private collection As New York Fashion Week Fall 2011 draws to a close, I wanted to compare some beautiful textile patterns that fashion designers this past year have shown...
The Daily Pattern is a Dutch blog dedicated to “textile design in progress.” Run by Swiss designer Zara Atelj, the blog collects unusual bits of data— weather reports, economic stats, even inkjet printer glitches—and repurposes them as abstract textile patterns. Pattern based on news data over a period of 48 days An experiment with newspaper...
