CONTENTS
INDULGE textiles to buy, collect or simply admire 26 COTTON ON Natalie Chanin of Alabama Chanin and Billy Reid’s Cotton Harvest By Rinne Allen 42 HEAD START Retrieving, reviving and re-making Central American indigo Photographs by Mark Eden Schooley, styling by Nelson Sepulveda
GLOBAL textiles from around the world 16 CONTINENTS, COMPOSITION & CHARISMA Photographer Anne Menke in Mexico 30 CHICKEN LINEN American feedsacks By Dr Vivienne Richmond 36 QUILTS OF FREEDOM African-American Quilts at Colonial Williamsburg By Linda Baumgarten 48 WEAVING A ROUTE THROUGH OAXACA With so many Mexican textiles to explore it can be hard to know where to begin... By Chris Jones and Palmira Serra
ANECDOTE textiles that touch our lives 13 HOW TO Recreate this issue’s cover star in felt By Cynthia Treen 96 SWATCH Favourite Fabric no.31:Tana Lawn By Sarah Jane Downing, illustration by Nina Fuga
ATTIRE critical reporting of fashion trends 14 COME AS YOU ARE The beauty of redefining dresscodes By Kate Cavendish 22 GREAT WHITE HUNTER Fashion’s obsession with the exotic By Dani Trew, images by Mario Testino and Norman Parkinson 64 UNIVERSAL UTILITY Carin Mansfield’s Invisible Permanent Clothing By Grace Warde-Aldam
CONCEPT textiles in fine art 58 ARTISTS BLOCK The allure of block printing By Amelia Thorpe, photographs by Richard Nicholson 76 MOLAS Textile art of the Kuna of Panama By Chloë Sayer
INDUSTRY from craft to commerce 52 MODERN ECCENTRIC Globetrotting with A Rum Fellow By Ptolemy Mann 57 DESIGN FILE The little-known Sheila Bownas By Grace Warde-Aldam
COHABIT stunning interiors beautifully photographed 46 INTERIOR DIALOGUE El Camino’s woven textiles Photographs by Mark Eden Schooley, styling by Nelson Sepulveda 70 RAINBOW BRITE Pippa Small’s Command of Colour By Emily Wheeler
CONTINENTS, COMPOSITION & CHARISMA
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Page 22: Norman Parkinson, Winter Sunshine Wardrobe in India, Vogue 1956 Page 23: Norman Parkinson, Floating with Flowers, Vogue 1956 Opposite: Mario Testino, Trail Blazers (Daria Werbowy & Lily Donaldson), Vogue, 2008
They simultaneously present an outdated and orderly vision of a disintegrating empire, while also feeding aspirational dreams of leisure and surplus.
imported goods, while being served by a black servant, “approaches a type of Britannia figure, an allegory of harmonious Empire.”
Diana Vreeland’s directorship at American Vogue increased the production of such images. As Alberto Oliva and Norberto Angeletti describe, “she considered the magazine a vast stage, on whose pages a spectacular show was taking place. And the stage had to have suitable sets and props. To provide them, she thought up fashion production locations at the most exotic places.” While theatricality and imaginative play are key elements of fashion photography, as Paul Jobling claims, it would be “myopic” to argue that fashion spreads: or that “a world of unbridled fantasies” are “innocent or without deeper ideological signification.”
Part of the underlying ‘ideological signification’ of these photos is that the ‘exotic’ and the fashionably expensive have always been linked.A cruder version of such images can be found on British ceramics, prints and textiles from the 18th century.They depict a white woman being accompanied or served by a black child. The V&A have gathered such instances, and describe the server being “depicted as a marginal, isolated figure who is included merely to reflect the wealth and fashionable tastes of their ‘owner’”. Similarly, an edition of The Spectator, from the same period, describes the clothes of a fashionable woman as the products of expanding imperial trade links. Her fan and muff are “from different ends of the earth”, her tippet “from beneath the pole”, and a diamond necklace “out of the bowels of Indostan”. As Erin Mackie puts it, the image of a fashionable woman dressed in and surrounded by
Today, more often than not, these fashion shoots don’t centre on an explicitly colonial narrative (though, shockingly, some still do). Rather it’s often a jet-set, gap year or hippy trail narrative which comfortably displaces the guilt.These contemporary shoots exist in a difficult balance between two opposing forces in the western imagination. The first is the liberal, fair trade eating, ethnic scarf buying impulse, which believes it is on the side of the developing world: the other is the appetite for asserting cultural capital and authority. In Trailblazers, a Mario Testino spread shot in Peru for Vogue in 2008, the models are presented as gap year travellers, engaging with local Peruvians.Their sartorial sophistication, however, places them above the locals. In one image, the model Daria Werbowy walks toward the camera in front of a group of Peruvian women with llamas, the text reading “Standing out from the herd in the foothills of the Andes in tulle skirt and cotton dress by Nicole Farhi”. The Peruvian women have literally been reduced to a herd of animals.
Does austerity, and fear of the diminishing power of the West, mean that we find comfort in asserting imaginative authority? Or is a nihilistic reduction of everything to props and sets just how the fashion system works? Whatever the reason, these shoots continually retreat into western self -congratulation, and mindlessly turn a history of brutality into a chic mise-en- scene that complements this season’s look perfectl y. ••• Dani Trew
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TITLE Sub head
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Below:Tied Quilt, made by Susana Allen Hunter (1912–2005), Dallas County,Alabama, 1970–1980
Below: Probably Anna Jane Parker (Mrs. Charles E. Parker), Log Cabin Quilt Top, probably St. Louis, Missouri, 1875-1900
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available, from worn-out denim work clothes to synthetic curtains and dresses. Although her quilts were utilitarian, they display artistry as well, combining a practical recycling of old materials with an improvisational and creative spirit.
Born in a rural area of Alabama, Susana Allen grew up in a large family of at least ten other children. She married a tenant farmer named Julius Hunter, in about 1928 and the couple raised two children, and their grandson, after his mother left to find work. Susana and Julius Hunter began their married life in Boykin, Dallas County,Alabama, but they had moved to Wilcox County by the 1950s. There they spent about 20 years as tenant farmers, occupying a two room house with newspaper stuck to the walls for insulation – and with handmade quilts spread on the beds for warmth. Judging from the sacks used as backings on the quilts, the Hunters bought sugar and animal feed by the hundred-pound bag.
One of Susana Hunter’s most electrifying quilts combines remnants of used clothing, tied to the backing with brilliant red yarn with the long tails left on the front face. The ties are spaced evenly over the quilt, unifying the whole and carrying splashes of bold red into the patches of blue and grey.The greyblue diamond patterned textile was once a doubleknit polyester dress fashionable in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The garment’s shaping darts and skirt contour are still detectable upon close examination. To create the quilt’s cotton backing, Susana Hunter recycled sugar and flour sacks by cutting them apart and opening them out flat.Although she turned the labels to the inside, the Co
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Some African-American quilters worked in an entirely different style. A traditional Log Cabin quilt can be attributed to Anna Jane Parker of St. Louis, Missouri. Anna Jane Parker was born in North Carolina about 1841, but had married Charles E. Parker and was living as a free woman in St. Louis by 1860. According to Helen McWorter Simpson, to whom the quilt descended, her grandmother, Anna Jane Parker worked as a seamstress and “sewed beautifully”. Granddaughter Helen had opportunities to observe her grandmother’s craftsmanship first hand, because after being widowed, Anna Jane Parker lived with Helen and her parents, Edmonia Parker McWorter and John McWorter.
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Anna Jane Parker assembled a colourful array of textiles – including patterned dress silks, upholstery fabrics, and ribbons – and combined them with black to create a stunning design of dark and light diamonds. To create a Log Cabin quilt, the maker works from the centre of a square out to the edges of each smaller unit, building up the design with carefully chosen rectangles of fabric that suggest the intersecting logs of the cabin. Unlike more typical piecing, in which shapes are stitched together at the edges to make the whole block, Log Cabin quilt pieces are assembled and stitched onto a foundation textile.This quilt maker was able to use a wide variety of everyday and mismatched cottons to form her foundation, because that element was eventually hidden by the decorative pieces. The quilt remains unfinished, without 4
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HEAD START
Retrieving, reviving and re-making Central American indigo
Rosalie De Ory began the label, or rather treasure trove, Ixcasala Indigo Reborn more than 15 years ago, after travelling through Central America and long before indigo became a mainstay for the fashionable in Europe. She has since made numerous return trips from her native France, often spending months hunting down rare, antique and precious indigo fabrics in the Altiplanos, old family archives and in far away markets, pushing farther inland with every trip.
Sometimes Rosalie leaves what she finds as it is, but often she works hard to work into and from found pieces to create something new and unmistakably hers. Working entirely on her own, Ixcasala is a labour of love. Often featuring constellations in her embroideries, stars somehow seem like the perfect design motif for Ixcasala; visually and dexterously drawing a link between the astronomical culture of Central America and the poetic sensibility of France. Furthermore each and every hand embroidered and labour intensive star speaks of Rosalie’s own commitment to her collections; from baby shoes to bed throws.
Although Rosalie is completely dedicated to indigo from Central America, she also understands and appreciates indigo from elsewhere in the world and any indigo pieces that she collects from say Japan, India or Africa are generally for her own personal collection, although a few come up for grabs from time to time. In any case she likes to tell the tales of each piece and the stories of those who have handled them in the past.
Having grown into quite an expert, Rosalie has also been involved in the Japanese Festival of dyers’ competition for Noren – the textiles traditionally hung from doors in Japan – and is currently the only ever non-Japanese judge.
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Although working alone has its advantages; greater control and personal experience, it does mean that an Ixcasala shop is out of the question. The label operates through a website along with carefully picked fairs and events and of course, word of mouth. GW ••• Sty lson Sepe l ing Ne
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