CONTENTS

INDULGE textiles to buy, collect or simply admire 11 SHOP ASSISTANT All present and accounted for by Polly Leonard 78 SHOP TALK NO 11 Jane Audas goes shopping at The Old Haberdashery

GLOBAL textiles from around the world 14 ROOF OF THE WORLD Kiki Xue celebrates Tibetan culture 36 MAGIC CARPETS Faig Ahmed’s twist on an Azerbaijan Tradition by Dr Laura Gray 48 THE COLOUR OF POMEGRANATES Textile hunting in the Caucasus by Emily Lush 54 CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT Ukrainian National Pride through Dress by stylists and photographers Treti Pivni

ANECDOTE textiles that touch our lives 24 BLOOMING MARVELLOUS Lora Avedian: Fabulous fabric flowers by Alice Sleight 30 FREUD’S FABRICS Sigmund Freud’s Personal Collection of Textiles by Bryony Davies 77 CHINA BLUE Noel Chapman’s Paste Resist Indigo Cloth from China

ATTIRE critical reporting of fashion trends 20 MOODY HUES Missoni and Etro’s Muted Palette & Tactile Textures by Kate Cavendish 42MADE IN CHINA The Eco Fashion Brands redefining ‘Made in China’ by Laura Shirreff

INDUSTRY from craft to commerce 34 THE RED CARPET TREATMENT The Azerbaijan Carpet Museum by Dr Shirin Melikova 60 ROSE-COLOURED GLASSES Textiles in Stained Glass by Jane Brocket 66 EAST IS EAST A Brief Account of the East End’s textile industry by The Gentle Author illustrated by Susy Pilgrim Waters

COHABIT stunning interiors beautifully photographed 70 EAST WEST, HOME IS BEST Su Mason’s East London home by Jo Leevers Photographed by Penny Wincer

EVENTS dates for your diary 10 November 2018 Covered Buttons & Mark Making with Rachael Howard, London, UK 24 November 2018 Paper Intricacies with Claire Brewster, London, UK 1 December 2018 Selvedge Winter Fair, London, UK 17-24 August Lora Avedian, Blooming Marvellous, 2 & 3 Dimensional Fabric Flowers, France

ROOF OF THE WORLD Kiki Xue celebrates Tibetan culture

Avedian’s embellishment practice allows her to be open to exciting collaborative opportunities. She has worked with a variety of outside practitioners, including her partnership with John Smedley Knitwear, a product of the QEST Craft Scholarship awarded to Avedian during her studies at the Royal College of Art. Another notable collaboration is that with fabric designer Claire De Quenetian, which comprised a series of cushions hand painted by De Quenetian and embellished by Avedian. When asked, Avedian explains that working collaboratively offers the opportunity to explore areas of practice that she otherwise would lack the confidence or the skill-set to do herself.

Acknowledging that considering somebody else’s vision can be challenging during the collaborative process, Avedian believes that the challenge is worth it, and sees the opportunity to step out of her comfort zone and view her work from an outside perspective as a benefit. With a nod to her set design practice, Avedian also enjoys collaborating with photographers, in particular Suzie Howell, whose aesthetic complements that of Avedian and affords her the opportunity to step back and view her textiles as more than objects but also as collections and compositions.

Keen to explore ideas of storytelling through4

Tibet has struggled to maintain its cultural identity since the 1950s. Today Chinese photographer Kiki Xue celebrates its unique character. Self-taught, Xue’s success stems from his humble origins in Jianyang City, in Chengdu. Xue has gained an international reputation for his work and is attracting the attention of prestigious clients. Driven by anxieties concerning history, nationalism and cultural authority, as well as a passion for beauty and art, he embraces the cosmopolitan culture of fashion in Paris, while remaining grounded in his own history. Xue is preoccupied by the contrasts between cultures, his eye seasoned by his appreciation of art history’s representations of Eastern and Western history.

“I’m not a documentary photographer. What I try to do is to combine and rework my inspirations, to abstract and innovate (within) traditional culture, (whilst keeping) its original mystery.”

Kiki Xue worked with Chinese fashion brand AYOU to explore the meeting points between Chinese and Tibetan textiles. Though at first glance these images fit into a well-known aesthetic of fashion editorials, on closer inspection they reveal a more nuanced conversation. The combination of traditional Tibetan textiles and contemporary Chinese clothing is an equally beautiful and unsettling reflection on the relationship between the two cultures, in which history and tradition have been re-imagined. •••

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FREUD’S FABRICS Sigmund Freud’s Personal Collection of Textiles

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Right Gautama, Handmade Carpet,

wool, 285 x 380 cm, 2017

the names of the Buddha, it’s hard to avoid the suggestion of impermanence and the futility of our desires for order and symmetry to govern the world. There is no permanent, fixed reality, this ordered and disordered carpet seems to say. To contemplate the melting pattern is to be reminded that everything in life is subject to change and alteration. In setting up an opposition between the rigidity of traditional formal composition and the freer, more emotionally charged dissolution, Ahmed quotes the classical use of juxtaposed features in oriental carpets. This opposition is found in the freedom of pattern in the central field, contained by geometrical shapes in the border. Exploring this pull between freedom and containment, tradition and innovation, Ahmed weaves conversations and questions into his work, giving intellectual enquiry full expression in material form. Part of what makes these carpets so seductive is the successful way that Ahmed has used the primary characteristics of the carpets, Islamic geometric decoration, delicate sprays of flowers, serrated leaves, and revealed those motifs in a radically new light.

Oriental carpets have been a staple of Western interior decoration for so long that you could be forgiven for not noticing if your chair is sitting on one right now. Their traditional motifs are drawn from across an area sometimes called the ‘carpet-belt’; stretching from Morocco across North Africa, the Middle East, into Central Asia and northern India, and including China, Turkey,

Iran, and the Caucasus. Oriental carpets arrived in Europe as a fascinating luxury commodity from unreachable lands, and were soon absorbed into Western art and material culture. They appeared with such regularity in the paintings of Hans Holbein and Lorenzo Lotto that their names came to be used by scholars to denote certain styles. Even in Matisse’s early twentieth century paintings such as Statuette and Vases on Oriental Carpet (1908), the magic of the carpet persists, and figures as diverse as Sigmund Freud and William Morris built collections of carpets from the East. Ahmed takes what is owed in this cultural exchange, drawing science, religion, and creative destruction (so important to the development of art in Europe), onto the loom in Baku. Here on the weaving frame, those ideas are synthesised with methodical working methods and given extraordinary expression by carefully knotting wool and silk. Stimulated rather than hemmed in by the medium he has chosen, Ahmed uses the form and process of carpet design and making as a robust historical, cultural and creative base for his existential explorations.

Door of Doors plays with the standard carpet design of border and field, repeating the border so that it steps in on its self, creating the feeling that the viewer is being drawn into or is falling into the black space of the field. This central space, usually strewn with flowers, birds, and sinuous foliage, and offering a glimpse into a paradisiacal garden, has been replaced with a void that has much in common with Mark Rothko’s floating dark rectangles. Eliminating decoration from the centre of the carpet, a space often suffused with religious connotations (the promise of paradise) Ahmed creates an opportunity for the viewer to enter the work, to sink into that receding black pile, and allow the void to reflect their ideas back to them.

In contrast Speech of Birds hums with life and colour, referencing Persian carpet design in its intricately patterned surface. Persia produced carpets of the highest sophistication, designed by artists who illuminated manuscripts and painted miniatures, and whose eye for pattern and composition was highly influential on Western design (think of William Morris’ Strawberry Thief). Ahmed extends the aesthetic satisfaction of the pattern by allowing his carpet to erupt with a burst of plumage that disregards the intricate and orderly in favour of vibrant and expressive colour and texture. Playing on the neat fringing that forms the beginning and end of a carpet, this mane hangs in an exuberant mass that brings the disorderly side of nature into the rule-abiding central field. 4

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‘Freud’s Vienna in the early 20th century was a hub of cultural and intellectual activity. As a gateway to the Ottoman Empire it was a centre for collectors of art, antiquities and, in particular, Persian carpets.’

Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, was an avid collector. Born in 1856 in Moravia, now the Czech Republic, Freud spent most of his life in Vienna as a physician, writer and analyst before emigrating to London in 1938. After the Nazi annexation of Austria in March of that year, Freud and his family’s situation had become untenable, and his friends and colleagues around the world aided him in obtaining a visa for Britain. Unusually for a refugee, Freud was able to bring with him his vast collection of antiquities, books and textiles, collected throughout his life, to his new home in Hampstead. Here, he and his family attempted to recreate the home and workspace he had cultivated in Vienna over a lifetime.

Freud’s Vienna in the early 20th century was a hub of cultural and intellectual activity. As a gateway to the Ottoman Empire it was a centre for collectors of art, antiquities and, in particular, Persian carpets. There Freud had had two workrooms, one his library and study, the other his consulting room. In his London home, one large room covered all those functions and served also as the family sitting room. A fine Heriz rug which had been in Freud’s consulting room in Vienna was now placed in the front section of the room, away from the couch. It’s an Iranian piece dating from around 1880, though it’s not clear when he acquired it as Freud was not an assiduous record-keeper. Another carpet, recently identified as being from the Iranian region of Bakhshayesh from around 1860, was placed under Freud’s desk close to the famous analytic couch. Shortly before leaving Vienna in 1938, the photographer Edmund Engelman came to Berggasse 19 to photograph Freud’s working and living space. This was done in secret, away from the prying eyes of Nazi authorities. Looking closely at all the Engelman photographs there appears to be no trace of this second carpet. It therefore seems probable that this carpet was purchased in the UK.

There are a couple of reasons for assuming this. The house in London was considerably bigger than the apartment in Vienna, and additional furnishings would have been needed. Freud’s son, the architect Ernst Freud, had lived in London since 1933, and through his practice would have been able to source new furnishings. Throughout the 1930s in England many large country houses were sold and their contents dispersed, and this rug, very typical of ‘English4

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