Art and Design Commons^™

Textile Design In The Marketplace, John E. Vollmer

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

INTRODUCTION:
As textile historians we are trained to observe physical evidence — materials, structures, methods of applying surface decoration and patterns. In brief, we deal with design. Despite our design focus, we frequently seek to explain differences within the context- of art historical research. Our conclusions, like those of the art historian, often focus on attribution and connoisseurship, rather than contributing to an understanding of textiles as cultural or economic indicators.

Although the academic study of design dates from the mid-19th century, only in recent years has this study moved from considerations of styling. Within the last three decades the …

Modern Traditions: The Impact Of The Trade In Traditional Textiles On The Sakaka Of Northern Potosi, Bolivia, Elayne L. Zorn

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

An elegantly dressed woman, wearing the handwoven clothing characteristic of her ethnic group, stands in front of a vendor displaying the latest machine-woven shawls from Bolivia's capital city, La Paz. The women, her daughter, and friends have just walked five hours from their rural home to attend an annual festival in the region's only town. The merchant, a young man of indigenous origin, wearing jeans, a jacket, sneakers, and a baseball cap, urges her to try on his merchandise. Glancing at her women friends for support, she opens the large safety pin holding closed her handwoven shawl and deftly slips …

Speaker Bios- 1990

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

SPEAKERS

A-Z (2 pages)

Rita J. Adrosko is Supervising Curator in the Division of Textiles, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, -D.C.

Patrida. RieffAnawalt is Director of the Center for the Study of Regional Dress at the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles, California.

Lisa L. Aronson is Assistant Professor at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York.

Suzanne Baizerman teaches in the Department of Design, Housing and Apparel and is Registrar for the department's costume, textile, and decorative arts collection in the Goldstein Gallery at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Elizabeth Barber is …

Carpets For Commerce: Rug-Weaving In The Caucasus, Carol Bier

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

At the turn of the 20th century, Caucasian carpets were in great demand among burgeoning European and American middle-class markets. With a history of carpet production going back at least three hundred years, rug-weaving in the Caucasus soared at the turn of the 20th century, first with economic incentives and the encouragement of czarist regimes, later as part of the Soviet economic system. Today, in an age of perestroika and glasnost. rug-weaving in the Caucasus for commerce and export lends itself readily to individual initiatives and private enterprise. Commercial production of carpets continues to be recognized as a means …

Ancient West Mexican Clothing And Its Ecuadorian Origins: New Evidence Of Maritime Contacts, Patricia Rieff Anawalt

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Evidence of ancient cultural contacts between coastal Ecuador and the mountains of West Mexico exists in clothing similarities between the two areas, namely tunic-like shirts and short breeches for males and a. tropical mode of dress for females. This non-Mesoamerican attire is illustrated in the early sixteenth century codex Relacion de Michoacan and also appears on mortuary figurines from the deep shaft tombs of Ixtlan del Rio, Nayarit (400 B.C.- A.D. 400). Coeval prototypes of this West Mexican clothing occur archaeologically along that section of the Ecuadorian coast which was the homeland of long-distance merchant navigators. Their trade goods, described …

Revolving Bananas: The Influences Of Indian Trade Textiles On Javanese Batik Design, Robyn Maxwell

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The influence of the Indian double ikat silk patola on Southeast Asian textile structure and design has long been acknowledged, however, the impact of Indian painted and printed mordant-dyed cotton textiles, traded into the region over centuries, has been largely undocumented. Recent finds now indicate the great variety of cotton textile types imported into Indonesia.

This talk explored the role of these Indian cotton trade textiles in the development of Javanese batik, and the effect of the change of medium on design transformations. Designs from a range of batik-producing regions were examined, including the well known pisang balik (inverted banana) …

Transatlantic Trade In Woollen Cloth 1850-1914: The Role Of Shoddy, David T. Jenkins

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

THE WORSTED CLOTH TRADE

The factors affecting European trade and competition in worsted cloth in foreign markets, notably the United States, in the second half of the nineteenth century are well recorded. From the 1840s the two main worsted cloth producing countries of Europe, Britain and France, pursued quite different strategies in production and trade. Developments in dyeing technology from the late 1830s allowed substantial improvements in the production of mixed worsted cloth; cloth of cotton warp and worsted weft. The British industry rapidly converted its production to the cheaper mixed worsteds for a much wider market to the extent …

Indian Textiles For The Thai Market: A Royal Prerogative?, John Guy

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The historical trade in Indian textiles to Thailand can be well documented from the beginning of the seventeenth century. Archaeological as well as textual sources allow our understanding of this trade to the region to be pushed back to the late thirteenth century, when Indian textiles had already assumed a high status at the court of Angkor.

In the course of the Ayudhyan period the control of this trade appears to have been secured by the Thai king and nobility. The earliest European accounts of trade with Thailand refer to the central role the king assumed, as both the dispenser …

Textiles And Trade In Tokugawa Japan, William B. Hauser

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Any discussion of the textile trade in Tokugawa Japan (1600-1867) requires that the socio-economic and political context first be outlined. Japan was a state divided into many separated political jurisdictions, with around one-quarter of the country controlled directly by the Tokugawa Shogunate and the other three-quarters under the local control of around 265 local barons or daimyo. While each of these local power-holders was subordinated to the shogun and required to spend half his time in attendance on the shogun at the Tokugawa capital of Edo (modern Tokyo), within his own domain he was an autonomous ruler. Each daimyo owed …

Studio And Soiree: The Use And Misuse Of Chinese Textiles In A European Setting, Verity Wilson

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

George Smith's painting, ‘The Rightful Heir’, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1874, serves as a melodramatic introduction to this paper. Sombre-suited gentlemen are depicted sitting around a table studying the disputed will. Two frightened ladies in crinolines and a small boy in a velvet suit confront the wicked usurper who is wearing a Chinese dragon robe. This angry Victorian was not unique in his choice of dressing gown.

The dragon robe, familiar from museum collections all over Europe and North America, was used in China in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an hierarchical garment. It was worn …

Moccasins Into Slippers: Traditions And Transformations In Nineteenth-Century Woodlands Indian Textiles, Ruth B. Phillips

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Towards the middle of the nineteenth-century a swift and dramatic transformation occurred in textiles and other kinds of art made by Woodlands Indians in northeastern North America, This transformation was accomplished in part by a wholesale replacement of indigenous materials with Euro-American manufactures— cloth for hide, glass beads for porcupine quills and silk ribbon for paint. It also encompassed the introduction of entirely new object types and the substitution of a new vocabulary of floral imagery for older iconographic traditions.

It is not, of course, coincidental that this change in iconography and materials occurred simultaneously with the rapid growth of …

The American Market For Indian Textiles, 1785-1820: In The Twilight Of Traditional Cloth Manufacture, Susan S. Bean

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

A brisk trade in Indian cloth developed soon after the end of the American War of Independence in 1783 and continued to flourish until Congress enacted a prohibitive tariff in 1816 to protect the nascent U.S. textile manufacturing industry. For the period 1795-1805, U.S. trade with India well exceeded trade with all European nations combined for all commodities (Furber 1938:258). Cloth was the centerpiece of this trade: The piece goods imported in 1804-05, for instance, were about three times the value of all other goods from India, chiefly sugar, indigo, ginger, and a variety of spices and drugs (Bhagat 1970:42). …

Textiles In Trade In West Africa, Brigitte Menzel

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Textiles in Africa since some time have become a topic of research, much of which is focused on aspects of art. The at least equally important economic aspects (production, consumption, and trade) are still rather neglected.

When doing field research in West Africa it is impossible to overlook the fact that most of the textiles in use could not have been produced locally. This applies not only to the colorful printed cottons but as well to handmade textiles.

In Asante (Ghana) I found woolen fabrics, which obviously were hand-woven but must have come from somewhere else as sheep and goats …

Of Cabbages And Kings, Ellen S. Smart

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper attempts to relate a small number of Mughal furnishing fabrics to their 17th C prices and to the purchasing power of Mughal money. There is no intent to give a comprehensive overview, but rather to see a few 17th C textiles, which today are rare and fabulously expensive, in terms of their original comparative cost. Information about the fabrics comes from the goods themselves and from contemporary Mughal paintings. Although inscriptions on the textiles contain some information about prices, several tables of textiles and prices are found in the Ain-i Akbari, a compendium on the mode of …

A Brief History Of The Textile Society Of America Summary Report By The President, Milton Sonday

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

After The Textile Museum decided to discontinue its Irene Emery Roundtables and die Centre International d'Etude des Textiles Anciens finally admitted it was not interested in an American branch, it became clear that an independent American group of textile enthusiasts should be formed to satisfy the many requests for such an organization. There had been an attempt to form a group which was called WHATS, but it never got off the ground. Peggy Gilfoy at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, one of the original organizers, was left guarding its small fund when it folded.

On April 3, 1987 a small …

The University Of Maryland Historic Textile Data Base, Clarita Anderson

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

INTRODUCTION

Our charge today is to discuss strategies and methodologies for gathering and extracting data from textiles. My specific task is to discuss the University of Maryland Historic Textile Data Base. This Data Base was officially established in September 1986 with a grant from the College of Human Ecology. Its purpose was to establish a sophisticated data management program on personal computers to handle the massive amounts of data necessary for research in this area. The long range goal of this project is to include all flat textiles. The immediate goal is to establish a data base on coverlets.

Before …

Wringing It Dry: The Challenge Of Prehistoric Textiles, Elizabeth Barber

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Some time ago I embarked on a "short little project" to find out what I could about Bronze Age Aegean textiles, which I had come to suspect were more elaborate and more important than anyone was giving them credit for. I knew the project could not take very long, and would not take more than maybe ten pages to write up, because virtually nothing in the way of textiles has survived from Greece—even in the Classical period, let alone the prehistoric era. But my father, who was a physicist, had instilled into me a question that changed everything: namely, "(If …

A French "Kashmir" Shawl In The Collection Of The Metropolitan Museum, Arlene Cooper

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper proposes a French provenance for a rare and superb long white shawl¹ in the collection of the Textile Study Room (TSR) of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This shawl has generally been thought to have been woven in Kashmir from a French design because of its weave structure, double weft-interlocked 2/2 twill, a characteristically Indian technique. The quality of the shawl is comparable to the finer Kashmir and French shawls of the earlier 19th c.; there are between 43 and 53 wefts per centimeter of goat hair in 12 colors used so effectively there appear to be …

Dedication- 1988, Milton Sonday

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This published proceeding is a milestone in the development of the Textile Society of America, a professional organization for people involved with the study and care of textiles. Without the strong and consistent guiding hand of its founding president, Peggy Gilfoy, the first steps of this fledgling organization would have been so painless, nor its accomplishments so impressive.

Peg's untimely death in November, 1988, has come as a shock to us all. For the Textile Society of America there can be no more fitting memorial to this generous colleague and scholar than the dedication of this volume to Peggy Stolz …

Crepe, Lillian Elliott

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This report is on Crepe, which I have been weaving for eighteen years. I've chosen to achieve crepe effects not by weave structure or finishing techniques, but by the amount, direction, and combination of spin in the yarn. In my work I have used available commercial yarns almost exclusively, although I am interested in handspun yarn effects as well. I've chosen to use plain weave or tabby, so as to eliminate other elements, and focus on the effects of the spin of the yarn.

The area on which I concentrated was intentionally limited; using plain wave I first combined different …

Manila Galleon Trade Textiles: Cross-Cultural Influences On New World Dress, Abby Sue Fisher

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Spanning a 250 year period from 1565-1815, the Manila Galleon Trade is a fascinating period in history which is addressed far too infrequently by textile scholars. The cross-cultural contact resulting from the Spanish conquest of America expanded to include Asia with the start of the trans-Pacific trade in 1565. Spanish trade ships sailed between Manila in the Philippines and Acapulco in New Spain, becoming the most enduring trade route in history. Three continents were involved: Asia, the Americas, and Europe, and consequently three entirely different cultures with their corresponding customs, belief systems and art styles. The steady contact between these …

Orientation And Symmetry: The Structuring Of Pattern Repeats In The Paracas Necropolis Embroideries, Mary Frame

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The most extensive Peruvian fabric remains come from the archeological site of Paracas Necropolis on the South Coast of Peru. Preserved by the dry desert conditions, this cache of 429 mummy bundles, excavated in 1926-27, provides an unparalleled opportunity for comparing the range and nature of variations in similar fabrics which are securely related in time and space. The bundles are thought to span the time period from 500-200 B.C.

The most numerous and notable fabrics are embroideries: garments that have been classified as mantles, tunics, wraparound skirts, loincloths, turbans and ponchos. In general, a single figure is repeated in …

A World Of Costume And Textiles, Susan Anderson Hay

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Susan Anderson Hay announced the publication of A World of Costume and Textiles: A Handbook of the Collection at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. Written by 13 authors, the book illustrates and describes 113 of the most important textiles and costumes in this superb collection. Begun in the 1870s with the founding of the Museum of Art, the textile and costume collection contains about 14,000 textiles and 6,000 examples of costume. It ranges from ancient Egyptian linen to contemporary Japanese artists' textiles and includes everything from colorful African Rente cloths to the early sixteenth century Flemish …

Index To Authors- 1988

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

INDEX TO AUTHORS

A-Z pp.165-69 (6 pages)

Anderson, Clarita

Baizerman, Suzanne

Barber, Elizabeth

Beardsley, Grace

Cooper, Arlene

Davis, Virginia

El-Homossani, M. M

Elliott, Lillian

Felsher, Lynn

Femenias, Blenda

Fisher, Abby Sue

Frame, Mary

...

Washbum, Dorothy K

Westfall, Carol D.

Wilson, Laurel Elizabeth

Techniques And Production Complexity Of Mississippian Period Textiles From Spiro, Oklahoma, Jenna Tedrick Kuttruff

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The archaeological site of Spiro, which is located in eastern Oklahoma, was a major civic-ceremonial center of the Mississippian cultural period from approximately A.D. 900 to 1400. These prehistoric peoples developed an extensive trade network, a highly developed religious center, and a political system which controlled the region. An exceptionally rich assemblage of artifacts has been recovered from the mounds at Spiro, and Craig Mound has produced the most extensive collection of preserved prehistoric textiles in the southeastern United States (Brown 1976, King & Gardner 1981, Kuttruff 1988).

METHODS:

A purposeful sample of 71 Spiro textile specimens from burial context …

The Kings As Gods: Textiles In The Thai State, H. Leedom Lefferts Jr,

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

If one observes the principles of Theravada Buddhist art, Thai textiles appear to pose a paradox. On the one hand, Buddhist art is defined as progressing hierarchically from representational to aniconic motifs, replicating movement from worlds of lesser merit to worlds of greater merit. On the other hand, we have the gloriously figurative and expensive garments worn by Thai royalty and adorning gods as depicted in temple murals. How is this seeming discrepancy to be explained?

A recent translation of a section of a larger work by the noted French scholar on Southeast Asia and Buddhism, Paul Mus, titled "The …

Transmutations Of The Tartan: Attributed Meanings To Tartan Design, Richard Martin

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

We all associate meaning with textile designs. If we can see the principles of Revolutionary zeal and the sanction of family life and work in one textile design, we can perceive the explicit Modernism of another and realize that in the complex decisions that comprise the creation of a textile, we have fashioned our world and its values. Perhaps the textile is small, but its condensed values and meaning may be a more clarified perception about the world than most others. For many, such as Roland Barthes, textiles and clothing can thereby be described as a sign system offering a …

The Validity Of Studies Of Pattern And Structure: Case Histories, Milton Sonday

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The importance of the analysis of continuous pattern and detailed recordings of the structures of lampas and velvet was driven home to me during my work on the Textile Museum's Safavid project. This resulted in "Pattern and Weaves, Safavid Lampas and Velvet" pp. 57-83 in the catalogue Woven from the Soul, Spun from the Heart published by The Textile Museum, Bier (1987). Practically anyone with a minimum knowledge of Iranian Safavid art and design of the 16th and 17th centuries can recognize a standard Safavid-style lampas and velvet because of motif. Therefore, why go any farther? Perhaps you don't, but …

Analysis Of Pattern Structure By Geometric Symmetries, Dorothy K. Washburn

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

INTRODUCTION

While a large literature exists on the technologies different peoples use to manufacture woven fabrics (cf. Emery 1966), little attention has been given to developing equally systematic ways to study the patterns produced. This paper outlines one approach to pattern analysis which utilizes mathematical symmetries to describe the way design parts are arranged in a pattern. The advantages of this method are discussed and examples of a number of problems that such an analysis of pattern structure can address are described.

SYMMETRY ANALYSIS:

Symmetry analysis is a mathematically based description of the structure of a pattern. It specifies the …

Feltmaking, Carol D. Westfall

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Felt is considered mankind's oldest textile. Created of wool or hair through pressure and shocking, and the application of heat and cold, felt is a warm, sturdy fabric used for shelter, clothing, carpets, saddles, and bags or container covers. Feltmaking is a world-wide tradition in the sense that it is practiced in such disparate regions as Mongolia, Central Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.

In the souk in Marrakech, Morocco, a two-sided prayer rug is created, one side white and one side grey, using the natural color of the fleece. The process involves the addition of soap …