Textile Arts Council

The King and I movie debuted in 1956 to rave reviews. Stars Deobrah Kerr and Yul Brynner got the full Hollywood costume treatment. Yul Brynner - in a switch - ...ended up wearing the more decorative costumes. The costume Brynner is wearing in this photo is heavily decorated with goldwork - even his shoes. Irene Sharaff won an Oscar for her costume design in the movie. #film #costumes #embroidery #KingAndI

TEXTILE TALKS: Creative Continuity with Joe Cunningham, presented by San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10 11AM PACIFIC / 2PM EASTERN via ...Zoom Join SJMQT for an hour conversation with quilt artist Joe Cunningham (@joethequilter)! From the artist: Having learned quilting from tradition-minded women 40 years ago, I was encouraged to learn all the old-fashioned techniques, to study quilt history, and to begin my quilt journey by copying old quilts. In those studies, I learned that the major implication of the American quilt format was that it was open to infinite creative freedom. In this studio tour and discussion of his quiltmaking philosophy, Cunningham will show how he has explored this idea in his own quilting life. Joe Cunningham has been a professional quilt artist since 1979. He has written essays on the subject for museum catalogues, books, and magazines. His ten books on quiltmaking include the first biography of a living quilter, the first book on men who make quilts (Men and the Art of Quiltmaking), and a definitive book on marking quilts for quilting called Quilting with Style published by AQS. His latest book is Man Made Quilts: Civil War to the Present, a catalogue for the show of the same name at the Shelburne Museum. He has been seen on the Peabody Award-winning PBS series Craft in America, the HGTV series Simply Quilts with Alex Anderson, as well as The Quilt Show with Ricky Tims and Alex Anderson, and others. His quilts are in the permanent collections of the DeYoung Museum, The Shelburne Museum, The Newark Museum, The International Quilt Museum, The San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles and many private collections. Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us//register/WN_HYPHOs9vS7O2n0zk6ZYxLg Check out our upcoming workshop with Joe Cunningham in March: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/e-pluribus-quilt-tickets-13400

The colorful world of Jean Patou in the 1960s. Head designers in this decade included Karl Lagerfeld (1960-64), Roland Klein (1962-65), and Michel Goma (1963--).

Ensemble With Dress & Stole. Dress, ca.1959 (back view). Silk jersey by Madame Gres. (Photo by Chicago History Museum/Getty Images

Tapestry of the Day Suzanne Paquette "Fractures" 71" x 35" Cotton warp, wool, synthetic fibers... One of 37 tapestries in the American Tapestry Biennial 13, an international contemporary tapestry exhibit juried by Nick DeFord. The exhibit will be opening on January 27th, 2021 at Highfield Hall & Gardens in Falmouth MA and on July 18th 2021 at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles. More information: https://americantapestryalliance.org/.../american.../ #ATB13 "

Waiting for the train. Penn Station, New York 1949

Vogue 1937 A sequined multicolored vest over a long woolen dress with fitted sleeves and a generously plumed feather hat all by Schiaparelli. Illustration by "Eric" (Carl Oscar August Erickson)

It's just a week till Halloween, so,... In 1848 a Féerie musical play debuted at the Théâtre National in Paris on the Boulevard du Temple. Based on the 17t...h century Jean de la Fontaine fable La Poule aux Oeufs d’Or (The Hen with the Golden Eggs). It tells about a farmer with a hen that lays an egg made of gold, every single day. To discover the source of his good luck, (and hoping to increase his prosperity), he opens the hen thus killing the animal without finding anything. Diverging substantially from the original plot of the story, a Féerie production could and did last several hours. They were typified by lavish costumes and sets, spectacular special effects, and numerous tableaux, along with the music. They were wildly popular in France throughout the 19th century. This illustration is of the costume for the Devil that was a part of this production. The costume’s design owes a good deal to the court masque costumes of prior centuries, and is designed deliberately so that even the people in the cheap seats would instantly understand who it was they were looking at. Th Féerie was a huge success and was re-issued in 1859. Here is a somewhat acerbic quote from critic Théophile Gautier : The characters, brilliantly clothed, wander through a perpetually changing series of tableaux, panic-stricken, stunned, running after each other, searching to reclaim the action which goes who knows where; but what does it matter! This dazzling feast for the eyes is enough to make for an agreeable evening. See more

Jiyoung Chung, 2019 Smithsonian Gold Award artist, showing her recent works at: https://www.bidsquare.com//smithsonian-craft-show-/catalog

This painting was commissioned in 1782 by Marie Antoinette, then queen of France, to her personal favorite portraitist, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun. The sitter is A...ntoinette’s bestie, the Duchesse de Polignac, Yolande-Martine-Gabrielle de Polastron. She was a lovely, lively young person, and a perfect companion for Antoinette in her largely loveless and despised existence as queen. Le Brun shows Polignac in the coming fashion, one forwarded by Antoinette who had been reading a lot of Rousseau and Voltaire, and suddenly wanted a simpler seeming existence, closer to the land and to nature. What she could not have possibly imagined was that this very desire towards greater simplicity would be used as a tool to foment the coming revolution. Those who opposed her claimed that she was attempting to destroy the French luxury trade by abjuring the very fripperies they had previously claimed were destroying the French people through her excesses. Her personal milliner, Rose Bertin did little to help her, since the clothes, though physically simpler, and of more commonplace materials, cost no less than the vast and outrageous costumes the queen had worn before. What is most interesting is that these very simple fashions, nearly devoid of trimmings and embellishments would come to symbolize the Revolution itself, and would influence women’s fashions for over a quarter of a century afterwards. See more

A free Zoom presentation on The Yi Tribes: Extraordinary Ethnic Dress of Southwest China on Oct. 31, 10 a.m. PDT The registration link is on the bottom of the announcement.

Wouldn't it be great if we could travel trough time...? I would love to see Erté design for Cirque du Soleil. love D'Artagnan.

The 3-metre long dresses from Al Salt, Jordan On 26 September of this year the TRC in Leiden published a blog (https://tinyurl.com/y6mpsxnx) about traditional d...resses in Jordan. Continuing with the series, we want to present a particular dress from the Al Balqa region, more precisely from the town of Al Salt. The TRC in Leiden is fortunate in housing one of these exceptional (and very large) dresses (TRC 2005.0248). The TRC also has replicas, which are used for demonstration purposes. Al Salt lies 28 km from Amman. The town has a rich and unique artistic-architectural style, bringing together European and Arabic elements. Situated on the highlands of western Jordan and close to the Jordan valley, its land is characterized by its Mediterranean vegetation of olive trees, figs, vineyards and other fruit trees, which are being harvested and exported throughout the area. Al Salt has always been famous for its wool, the threads that are spun and the red dyes that are being used (due to the presence of sumac trees), but above all the city was known for its unique and admired women's dresses. The traditional dress is called Khalaga and requires almost sixteen meters of black cotton (dubeit) fabric. The dresses are decorated with a little embroidery, usually concentrated around the neck opening, along the seam lines and the sleeves. Blue indigo-dyed bands are applied vertically on the sleeves and around the hem. The sleeves (irdan) are very long and have a triangular shape. They are pulled over the headband (asba) to form a sort of head covering. The asba is a very large, rectangular piece of red or black silk. It is folded to form a long rectangular band which crowns the woman's head, but its main purpose is to keep the sleeves in place. The TRC Collection houses two of these head bands (TRC 2005.0164; TRC 2011.0481). Wearing this three-metre long dress might at first cause some hassle to put it on. The dress is pulled all the way up and fastened at the waist with a woolen belt. It is then left to drape over the belt creating in this way a folded layer effect. The reasons for wearing such a long dress is little known, but there is a popular story that efers back to the Ottoman period, when women used to smuggle and hide valuable stuff from the tax collectors inside her dress. Nowadays the use of the Khalaga dress has completely disappeared from women’s daily life. And yet, there is a long standing tradition for women of various ages to make their way to downtown Al Salt, to the photo studio and have a picture taken wearing a rented Khalaga dress. This photograph is then framed and displayed inside the house as a symbol of pride, vanity and belonging to this city. Recently, I was very pleased to discover a small group of local women from Al Salt who decided to revive the use of the Khalaga dress in a renewed form. They made the dress smaller and more suitable for modern daily life. They maintained some basic elements, such as the blue bands and the long pointed sleeves, but also introduced a new embroidered motif to the dress. This modernization brought this forgotten dress back to life and nowadays you can easily spot women wearing it on special occasions, such as at graduation parties, weddings and religious celebrations. The town of Al Salt has a special place in my heart. It was the hometown of my grandparents, my summer childhood memories belong there and whenever I talk about Al Salt, sweet memories come back to life. Hence this summer, during my embroidery workshop at Capelle A/D IJssel (The Netherlands), I decided to talk about the Khalaga dress and give a small demonstration on how to wear it. The dressing up of the workshop ladies ended up to be a difficult task, wrapped up with infinite moments of laughter and joy. Trying to lift up the three meter dress and drape it down correctly was a complicated affair and the hot summer weather made it even more difficult. At the end we all wondered and asked ourselves how was it possible to wear such a heavy dress during the summer season? A question that I couldn’t give answer, an enigma that will remain hidden in the souls of the past and the ruins of history. Illustrations: - Woman in Al Salt wearing a khalaga dress. Photograph by Fatima Abbadi. - Khalaga dress from Al Salt, Jordan. Photograph by Fatima Abbadi. - Headband (asba) from Jordan, 1970's (TRC 2005.0164). - Two models in the Netherlands, wearing replica Al Salt khalaga dresses, made by the TRC. Photograph by Fatima Abbadi. Fatima Abbadi, 25 October 2020.

From 26 November, 2020 until 16 January, 2021, Alison Jacques Gallery will present the first solo exhibition in Europe devoted to three generations of women art...ists living in Gee’s Bend, now known as Boykin. The women of Gee’s Benda small, remote, Black community in Alabamahave created hundreds of quilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present. Image: 'Pig in the pen' - block style, Rita Mae Pettway Find out more: https://www.alisonjacquesgallery.com

There are certain garments that exist now as active useful parts of the Attire language that have moved through time virtually unchanged from their root origin ...that I refer to as proto-garments. Proto-garments, as I perceive them, are those shapes that emerged first, and required little if any construction. The tee shaped tunic is one of these. It is a form of garment that developed independently in cultures all over the world, for the evident reason of its being such a logical answer to clothing the body with rectangles of woven material. This example is a Choga, a traditional tunic/coat garment worn by men in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan. Made in the early 19th century, this version, while retaining the obvious shape of its origin, also expresses the influence of change through the addition of some triangular gores in the choga skirt, as well as a shaped collar. Collection of thee Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

For anyone who enjoys reading : The Gown By Jennifer Robson It’s a historical novel about the women who made Queen Elizabeth’s wedding dress. A fascinating rea...d with a bit of romance tossed in for good measure. It’s a little gem of a book. Google photos of Queen Elizabeth’s gown ...amazing. One doesn’t realize the hours it took to hand sew all those beads, etc. and just how heavy the gown was. Just a good all around read. See more

A REMARKABLE SOZNI KASHMIR SHAWL Inspired by Mughal Jaali screens of the 1700s. 18 months and around 1.5 million hand-embroidery stitches in silk thread. A mas...terpiece commissioned by an old client with whom we share a close relationship. The fabric is hand-spun extraordinarily ultra-fine at around 200/2nm while a year and a half were spent meticulously embroidering the entire surface of it. It was a challenge considering the fineness of the fabric that kept slipping out of hand. The silk embroidery yarn gives beautiful subtle hues as light reflects in different ways from varying angles while the unembroidered sections form a perfect pattern of a Mughal Jaali screen or lattice. The shawl measuring 40 inches x 80 inches is extraordinarily light at only 198 grams and so fine that it fits into a standard pocket. To know more about our Kashmir shawl revival initiative or how you can commission a piece, message us here on Facebook or write to us on [email protected]

The Romanov Kokoshnik tiara. Made for Empress Alexandra of Russia this diamond tiara was inspired by the elaborate Russian traditional wedding Kokoshnik headdr...esses. Theis famous tiara was often worn by Queen Mary, wife of King George V, who called it ‘her Saturday night sparkler’ ... Mary also said ‘if your a queen, look the part. Impress with awe.’ It is now often worn by Queen Elizabeth II at state dinners for exactly the same reason her Grandmother said. It is the same tiara... Alexandra held it in place with a a Large carbachon sapphire hair-pin at the front that exactly matched her eye colour See more

This goldwork embroidered button was found in a button sample book dating to ca.1790. The button features embossed metal appliquéd using goldwork threads. Ther...e are also spangles and paste jewels. A button like this was meant to decorate a man's waistcoat. Check out the images at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/82628 #goldwork #embroidery #button