All Photos By Gail
By the 20th century, wool suits and coats were indispensable, practical elements of fashionable daywear for women. Double-faced wool, used here by designer Mila Schön for her Blue Coat (1968) is woven almost as two separate textiles, joined by a set of interwoven yarns, creating a thick, structural, spongy fabric.
Continue reading Eye On Design: Mila Schön, Blue Double-Faced Wool Coat
All Photos By Gail
For designer Jun Takahashi’s Undercover 2015 spring/summer ready-to-wear collection, he presented a series of dresses in textiles printed with phantasmagoric iconography from Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, the Garden of Earthly Delights, collaged in a manner that heightens the painting’s proto-Surrealism.
Continue reading Eye On Design: Undercover Spring/Summer Ensembles Featuring Hieronymus Bosch Textiles
Photos By Gail
Grant Wood designed this Lounge Chair and Ottoman in 1938 for his own living room. Henry R. Lubben, a Cedar Rapids furniture maker, manufactured the design in a variety of fabrics, with or without tasseled fringe, and sold it in department stores through the Midwest as the Grant Wood Lounge Chair. Continue reading Grant Wood Lounge Chair and Ottoman
All Photos By Gail
Issey Miyake and Dai Fujiwara’s A-POC Queen (1997) is a textile generated from a single thread by a computer-programmed industrial knitting machine. The resulting openwork knit tube bears a repeating pattern of woven seams that create a patchwork of shapes whose outlines suggest dresses, shirts, socks, gloves and hats. The customer can cut along the seams without destroying the tubular structure of each individual item, and virtually no material is wasted in the process of creating — without needle or thread — a complete monochromatic outfit from this single swath of cloth.
Continue reading Eye On Design: Issey Miyake and Dai Fujiwara, A-POC Queen
Photographed in the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum
In the mid-to-late 20th century, an atmosphere of innovation and a desire to question the tenets of modernism led some designers to explore a variety of ways in which to shape space. American Architect and Designer Alexander Hayden Girard utilized color and pattern in textiles, particularly in this colorful abstract, or folk art-inspired work for Herman Miller.
Continue reading Eye On Design: Glass Armchair by Shiro Kuramata