Fashion Design Commons^™

Lambani Textiles: Oscillating Between The Past And The Present, Beena Santosh Modathi, Anjali Karolia

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper examines the experiences of home-based women zardozi artisans in Bhopal, India, who use traditional embroidery skills to create fashionable products. It highlights the role of the traditional craft sector in promoting women's empowerment, enhancing economic well-being, and supporting sustainable development in the Global South. Through ethnographic research, including literature review and interviews, the study reveals the resilience of these artisans, many of whom come from low-income backgrounds with limited education. Despite modest earnings, Textiles embody narratives, legacies, and lineages. Indian traditional textiles, particularly those featuring strong Lambani embroidery, represent a dynamic interplay of ancestral techniques, motifs, and cultural …

Public Patriotism, Silent Dissent: Women And The Making Of Senninbari In Wartime Japan, Mariko Nagai

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

During the early years of the so-called “Fifteen Year War” (1931–1945), Japanese women and girls created senninbari when men received draft notices to serve. Often worn around soldiers’ waists underneath their uniforms, these sash-shaped talisman were embroidered with 1,000 red knots, each knot made by a woman. In a time when the Japanese government censored dissenting voices against its militaristic and nationalistic foreign and domestic policies, this government-encouraged gesture of stitching senninbari became one of the few ways in which women could voice their personal protests within patriarchal gender expressions (良妻賢母 “good wife, wise mother”). Senninbari’s design evolved with regional- …

Textile As Cultural Technology: The Evolution Of Robert Rauschenberg’S Jammers, 1975–6, Katya Oicherman

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Robert Rauschenberg suggested that any material has a “humanitarian reportage” or a history built into it, that opens art to the “strange and unpredictable” experience only comparable to everyday reality. Developing this idea, I will focus on the Jammers, a series of works with significant textile presence produced in 1975–76, and discuss how Rauschenberg’s relationship to textiles evolved from treating them as “materials” to recognizing them as cultural technologies. In 1975 he was on a fellowship in Ahmedabad, India, a period of intense experimentation.

Textiles were already a significant presence in his art, playing a subservient role of materials …

Inconclusive Objects: Sample Making As Inquiry-Driven Practice, Etta Sandry

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In Inconclusive Objects: Sample Making as Inquiry-driven Practice I will discuss craft sample making as a valuable practice of critical thought and experimentation. Craftspeople, artists, and designers make samples to practice technical skills and to demonstrate results on small scales. It is process work, typically used to learn a new technique or a hidden step on the way to a final product. However, as a cumulative process of research, material probing, and play, sampling is a critical aspect of design and creation. What can a closer study of sampling reveal about creative practice and knowledge production in craft and beyond? …

Textile Ways Of Thinking As A Trauma-Informed Design Tool To Research And Understand Communities, Smrti Ganesan, Nishanth Srikanth

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

There has been a shift in methodologies in the broader world of design. Today, co-design and participatory methods are a vital part of the modern designer's toolkit, and designers are finding new ways to interact with communities and design solutions that are more responsive to the actual needs of those communities.

Textile design has historically been a medium for expressing and processing traumatic experiences, reflecting individual and collective traumas in society. Textiles have also historically served not only as a form of artistic expression but also as a powerful tool in activism, particularly within feminist movements. Recent developments have seen …

Solidarity Dividend With Us Wool And Community Engagement To Address Socioeconomic Inequities, Helen X. Trejo, Angela Becerril

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

As a long-standing natural fiber, wool provides an opportunity for community engagement and reflexive practice. Our process involved sourcing wool from US sheep and wool farms in lower income areas and hands-on textile development, and intersectional reflection. Being at a Hispanic Serving Institution, informed approaches to engage with concepts, such as the “zerosum paradigm” and “Solidarity Dividend” based on Heather McGhee’s NY Times Best Selling book “The Sum of Us.” It explores how racism affects intergenerational wealth among minorities. The zero-sum paradigm is the idea that progress is a tradeoff; benefits to some is at an expense for others. The …

Lavenz, Valenz, Levenxë, Lavexha, Lavenzka: Woven Felted Blankets From The Korçë Region In Southeastern Albania, Alexis Zoto

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper will look at and document colors and patterns and motifs of woven and felted blankets from the Korçë region of southeastern Albania. Very little is published on these textiles. This paper will document the disappearing and under appreciated textile, and why are they no longer understood or valued. In Albania and in Albanian diaspora communities this textile has had different names in prewar, prewar Korçare dialect and now.

I will be drawing from information gathered interviewing parishioners who volunteered to share their heirlooms and information gathered from examining the textile(s). These heirlooms belong to members of multiple generations …

The Making Of Everyday Hollywood: 1930s Film Influence On Everyday Women’S Fashion In Nebraska, Anna Naomi Kuhlman

Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This research examines the influence of film fashions on middle-class, Nebraskan women’s dress during the Great Depression (1932-1940). The Great Depression challenged the middle class: while standards of living remained high, the economic means to achieve those standards diminished. Despite the crisis, women strove to keep up with current fashion trends. While previous literature has examined how Hollywood directly affected trends and styles of the 1930s in major American metropolitan contexts, the manifestation of trends in the dress of middle to lower socio-economic classes in Middle America remains under-examined. Against the backdrop of Depression-era hardships specific to Nebraska’s agricultural economy, …

“Any Lady Can Now Learn To Cut Perfect Fitting Dresses”: The Role Of Pattern Drafting Systems In The Production Of Women’S Dress, 1880–1900, Alyssa Smith

Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This research conveys findings from my MA thesis research focused on pattern drafting systems for women’s garments developed between 1880 and 1900. The study builds on the seminal work of Claudia Kidwell, who divided these systems into three categories: proportional, hybrid, and direct measure. To date, the study of this textile technology and how it positioned women and sewing in both domestic and professional spheres has received little scholarly attention, but pattern drafting technology transformed the possibilities for pattern creation and proportionate measurements, especially for home sewers. It also aided in the paper pattern and ready-made clothing industries. This research, …

Beauty And Lifestyle Subscription Services: A Modern Retailing Format For The Vigilante Collaborative Consumption Consumer, Melisa Spilinek

Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Advancements in technology and ease of use of online shopping via phone applications (apps) and subscription services have fundamentally changed how consumers shop. Now more than ever, consumers are turning to time-saving technological tools that are subscription services. Subscription services provide a multitude of benefits to consumers and contribute to collaborative consumption in nearly every product and service category from coffee to apparel. To investigate beauty and lifestyle subscription services and collaborative consumption this study will utilize a mixed methods convergent design to analyze user experience including price sensitivity, subscription service apps and ease of use. Anticipated contributions to the …

Printed Repeat Pattern Development For Textiles: Design Theory And Process, Erin Kelly

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

I created a collection of fifteen printed repeat patterns accompanied by a written description of the research and development process as a creative project to fulfill the requirements of a Senior Honors Project. Looking at this project from a traditional research standpoint, I sought out to answer several questions that would help me to develop as a textile artist. How do you find current, up-to-date, relevant trends, both ideological (macro) and material (micro)? How do you take these trends and communicate them visually, in an original fashion? How do you produce a collection of designs that is both diverse and …

Freedom Quilt: Collective Patchwork In Post-Communist Hungary, Christalena Hughmanick

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The paper investigates the democratic and social values of patchwork quilting through its culture of open-source pattern sharing and communal group work – using The Freedom Quilt Hungary project as a primary example. I facilitated a social engagement artwork, developed in 2019 on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the end of Socialist rule in Hungary in 1989. This change resulted in new laws, allowing for the formation of the Hungarian Patchwork Guild (HPG), with whom I worked closely to create the work. It provided members of this group and the public with a platform to define individual notions …

Prejudiced Commodities: Understanding Knowledge Transfer From India To Britain Through Printed And Painted Calicoes, 1720-1780, Aditi Khare

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The eighteenth-century trade in calico between Europe and India was a function of global textile manufacture, exchange, and consumption on multiple levels. This trade had several political, cultural, and economic consequences— the most important of which, I suggest, was the transfer of useful knowledge from artisanal oral textile traditions in India to the receptive, commercial, and nascent cotton printing industry in Europe.

This paper explores the contribution of Indian cotton printing knowledge towards the development of Europe’s cotton industry and, consequently, its dissemination through European knowledge networks. In particular, the largely overlooked chemical knowledge pertaining to dyes and mordants responsible …

Schoolgirl Embroideries & Black Girlhood In Antebellum Philadelphia, Kelli Racine Coles

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Embroideries stitched by girls at schools for Black children in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are rare finds in the antiques world. The few embroideries likely stitched by Black schoolgirls that do survive often offer historical evidence in the form of the names of their makers’ schools stitched onto their embroideries. Yet there is little scholarship on these embroideries or the education these schoolgirls were pursuing while creating their samplers. In scholarship using material culture as primary evidence, these embroideries provide valuable clues about the lives of Black girls in northern cities during the antebellum period. My work examines the …

Arpilleras The Vessels Of Chile’S Resistance, Soledad Fátima Muñoz

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Most historians locate the beginning of the Chilean military government after the coup d’etat, which overthrew democratically elected President Salvador Allende, on September 11, 1973. However, I would like to focus on the ideological background that preceded this era through the investigation of arpilleras and their relationship to Western academic institutions in the making and writing of history—more specifically, to the University of Chicago as the “Ideological State Apparatus” responsible for the implementation of neoliberalism in Chile.

Arpilleras are patchwork-based textiles of narrative imagery, made with a technique of applique and embroidery on a burlap background. They are produced in …

Plants In The Tapestry (Literally), Ann H. Peters, Adriana Soldi S.

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Among our studies of ancient Peruvian textiles created in tapestry technique, we have come across some surprising elements, both in the warp and the weft. Andean textiles created over the past 10,000 years have been preserved in certain locations along the Pacific desert coast. They are usually preserved in the cloth bundles that protect and adorn the dead, and composed of fibers from native cotton varieties of Amazonian ancestry, the hair of highland ancestors of today’s llama and alpaca, maguey leaves from the mid-valley canyons, and reeds from coastal marshes. Garment forms, techniques and imagery can indicate textiles produced in …

Kenyan Basketry (Ciondo) By Women From Central And Eastern Kenya, Mercy Wanduara

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The Kenyan baskets commonly known as kiondo/kyondo (s)/ciondo (p) are made by women in different parts of Kenya mainly as utilitarian items for carrying goods around. The baskets are made using traditional/indigenous fibers that are readily available near where people live. The fibers may be from plant stems of shrubs, barks of trees, or banana fibers. The fibers are manually harvested, processed (spun), dyed, and woven into baskets. Dye stuffs are produced locally from natural sources such as mud (brown), leaves from specific plants (green), tree barks (red and brown), and charcoal (black), among other sources. Even though basketry is …

A Compared Study Of Miao Embroidery And Ancient Chinese Embroidery: The Cultural And Historical Significances, Tomoko Torimaru

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The Miao people of Guizhou province, China, use two different types of chain stitch. One is a standard chain stitch similar to the Western style. The other one, which I termed “ancient” chain stitch, is distinctly different in execution and appearance, and it is a technique that only Miao practice currently.

Numerous examples of fine chain stitch embroidery have been excavated from archeological sites in China, including the Jiangling Mashan No.1 Chu Tomb, Jingzhou, Hubei, Warring States period (770–221 BC) and the Mawangdui No.1 Tomb, Changsha, Hunan, Western Han period (206 BC–AD 8). These extant embroideries clearly illustrate a unique …

Alnôbakskwak: Native American Women Making Ceremonial Regalia, Vera Longtoe Sheehan

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In the borderland between the United States and Canada stand communities of Native American people whose resilience enabled them to survive the ravages of hundreds of years of wars, eugenics, and racism that persists into the present day. These factors contributed to the decline of traditions and a subsequent period of cultural renewal and pride that has led up to several Abenaki tribes petitioning the State of Vermont for tribal Recognition. When the Recognition applications were compared, it became apparent that they had retained many of their agricultural traditions and that their cultural revitalization efforts could be extended not only …

Of Prophets, Caterpillars, And Silver: Job And The Origin-Story Of Sericulture In The Early Modern Islamic World, Nader Sayadi

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Similar to most pre-modern guilds and crafts around the world, the silk craft had origin-stories and patron saints to provide its practitioners with “historical” background and institutional heredity. In the early modern Safavid era— as discussed in a rare silk-weaving treatise in Persian titled The Treatise of Silk-Weaving and Grasping the Grip of the Shuttle (Resāleh-e yeh Shaʿrbāfi va Gereftan-e Qabzeh-e yeh Māku) dated October 18, 1606—the origin-story of sericulture and silk-weaving has been woven into the Biblical/Qur’anic narrative of Job (Ayyoub). The contemporary Ottoman futuwwatnama literature gives similar narratives; however, the story of Job in the Bible and Qur’an, …

Tameji Ueno: A Living National Treasure Of Kyoto Textiles, Keiko Okamoto

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

When the Japanese word yūzen is translated into English, it is hard to find an exact expression, as yūzen is used to describe both “hand-painted dyeing on textiles” and a “look-alike style of prints.” Yūzen is the unique aspect of Japanese “motif dyeing” in which the pre-modern hand-painted method survives when printing methods are used for mass production.

The Ueno family from Kyoto devoted themselves to design and manufacture of high-end hand-painted yūzen dyeing since the early twentieth century.

This paper will follow the Ueno family’s one hundred years of contributions to kimono textile development along with its applications and …

An Uncommon Ammunition Case: Interpreting “Transitional” Textiles And Social Worlds In Nineteenth-Century Tlingit Alaska, Laura J. Allen

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Overlooked objects in museum collections can reveal complex social relationships behind well-known textile forms. A tattered woven case for ammunition cartridges, collected in southern Alaska in the late nineteenth century, presents such an opportunity. Part of the vast Tlingit collection at the American Museum of Natural History, the ammunition bag has been little documented and displayed compared to other highly esteemed indigenous naaxein or Chilkat weavings of the region. The piece is unusual in that the maker combined two weaving styles—not only figural motifs characteristic of Chilkat weaving, but also geometric patterns reminiscent of its stylistic and technical precursor called …

Signed In Silk And Silver: Examining An Eighteenth-Century Torah Ark Curtain And Its Maker, Genevieve Cortinovis, Miriam Murphy

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Around 1755, Simhah Viterbo (c. 1739-1779) completed a luxurious Torah ark curtain, or parokhet, in Ancona, an important port city on Italy’s Adriatic coast. The base fabric, a bright blue silk satin, is appliqued with gold and silver guipure embroidery, vellum sections covered with metal-wrapped threads, spiral wound wires, and flattened strips of metal. Paillettes punctuate the Hebrew inscription, which runs across the curtain’s lower edge. The central grotesque composition, a series of stacked, diapered cartouches in the vein of Daniel Marot (1661-1752), fans out towards the enclosed borders. Florist flowers—blousy carnations, roses, and campanula—delicately embroidered in blush-colored silk threads, …

Glitched Metaphors: Dysfunction In Hand-Woven Digital Jacquard, Gabe Duggan

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This presentation demonstrates various ways in which the TC1 has supported my work’s exploration of tension, balance, and precarity. By embracing and pushing expectations of traditional fiber work, these weavings question inequalities within contemporary performances of gender and exhibitions of power. My work on the TC1/TC2 digital jacquard loom has been primarily tethered to one specific machine with which I have shared a personal past and future for just over a decade. Through this technology I have built and negated tension, challenging a broad range of power dynamics. My work with this TC1 seeks to exploit and balance this technology …

A Tale Of Two Sisters: Invisibility, Marginalization And Renown In A 20th Century Textile Arts Revitalization Movement In New Mexico, Suzanne P. Macaulay

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

While this presentation does not address oppression in the global textile industry and injustices to leagues of anonymous enslaved women workers, it does raise questions about the vicissitudes of fame and obscurity of two women relative to artistic creation and textile arts revitalization efforts. This is the story of two Varos sisters, who married two Graves brothers, and lived in Carson, New Mexico. In the early 1930s Frances and Sophie Graves with their extended families repaired Spanish colonial textiles for the Santa Fe market. At some point they began to recreate traditional Spanish colonial-type colcha embroideries from recycled materials salvaged …

Between Craft And Design: Lucienne Day And Eszter Haraszty, Kevin Kosbab

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Lucienne Day and Eszter Haraszty were leaders in both the design and business of mid-century textiles, Day through prominent commissions with Heal Fabrics and other firms in Britain, and Haraszty as director of Knoll’s textile division in the United States. Later, each designer turned from design for commercial production toward needlework-derived textile art, but their attitudes and methods were strikingly different. Both designers’ commercial work is well documented in scholarly design literature (Day’s especially), but their needlework is relatively neglected. This paper will shed deserved light on their textile art at a time when the studio craft movement was solidifying, …

Shared Provenance: Investigating Safavid-Mughal Cultural Exchange Through Luxury Silks In The Sixteenth And Seventeenth Centuries, Nazanin Hedayat Munroe

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

When examining silk textiles attributed to the early modern Persianate world, there is always some uncertainty as to whether they were produced in Safavid Iran or Mughal India. The confusion is warranted: the two courts share many of the same ideas, images, and even family connections, creating a broad cultural overlap. This becomes apparent in the arts from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, as politics and patronage prompted the migration of key Safavid artists, including weavers, from Iran to Mughal India. As Persian painting was developed in the royal atelier, luxury silks were also produced with Safavid techniques.

Examining these imported …

Colcha Circle: A Stitch In Northern New Mexico Culture, Olimpia Newman, Rebecca Abrams

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Colcha embroidery is folk art, characteristic of northern New Mexico history, traditions, and a form of cultural expression that has not been researched and documented sufficiently. It has been practiced in private homes and small circles as a result of commissions or economic development programs, as has also been the case in the San Luis Valley, Colorado. Despite the exposure offered by local markets and demonstrations during events in New Mexico, the embroidery is in many ways an unknown technique, even to the next generation.

This video captures a candid discussion among eleven colcha artists, some of whom are entering …

Scandal And Imprisonment: Gold Spinners Of 17th Century England, Tricia Wilson Nguyen

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

When looking at seventeenth-century silk- and gold-embroidered jackets or heavily wrought cabinets, most people focus on the embroiderer’s skill. Instead, my interest rests with the makers of the thread used to create such luxuries—silk thread, gold thread, and silver thread. Perhaps surprisingly, many early thread makers were women, owners, and managers of home-based industries in which spinning gold and silver was their business and livelihood.

Unfortunately, the history of gold spinning in seventeenth-century England is one of “scandal and imprisonment,” with women’s prominent role neglected by history. Beginning in the 1620s, women gold spinners were thrown in jail for refusing …

Hidden Stories/Human Lives: Proceedings Of The Textile Society Of America 17th Biennial Symposium, October 15-17, 2020--Full Program With Abstracts & Bios

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The theme Hidden Stories/Human Lives presents opportunities to reveal complex and hidden stories of global textile making and coincides with the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Yet, just as the voices of women of color, marginalized by the suffrage movement, are only now being recognized, the stories of the many human lives that have contributed—directly and indirectly—to textile making, including enslaved people, immigrant entrepreneurs, and industrial laborers, remain untold. With this symposium, we hope to get “behind the curtain” to explore the wider human network engaged in textile production, bringing to light hidden stories …