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ContentsINDULGEtextilestobuy,collectorsimply admire 13 Sitting pretty Can you ever have too many cushions? In her shopping suggestions Polly Leonardplumpsforscreenprintsandsimplesackdesigns15TheSelvedgeAutumnFairAroundupofthesomeofourfavouritedesignersexhibitingattheSelvedgeFairon17September...Ifyoucan’tjoinusonthedaythenvisittheirwebsites76MakingWavesIllustratorClaireFletcherdoeslovetobebesidetheseasideAninterviewwithnewSelvedgedrygoodsdesignerClaireFletcher.JoinherworkshopattheV&AinNovember
CONCEPT textiles in fine art 30 COVER STORY Art institution Arthur Bispo do Rosário Found freedom through making Curator MartinBarlowlooksattheworkandtroubledlifeofthisBrazilianoutsiderartist
INDUSTRY from craft to commerce 17 Building Bridges The struggle to save America’s industrial textile heritage PhotographerRusty TagliarenidocumentsthelastremainingsilkmillintheUnitedStates 37 Death by design Textile related crime mysteries Phil Thomascontributes four casestudies of designersorindividualsconnectedtothetextileindustrywhoselivescametoanintriguingend 42 Idle hands Prison charity Fine Cell Work won’t tolerate waste BethSmithfindsoutmoreabout atextilecharitywhoimprovethelivesofprisonersbyemployingthemtoembroider
66 COVER STORY The Triangle Fire The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire PrimroseTrickerlookback atthelegacyofthistextiletragedyonits100thanniversary
GLOBAL 28 First Class Style Bruce Peter travels back in style on the Orient Express GlasgowSchoolofArt ProfessorandHistorianBrucePetersadmiresthedesignofthisiconicmethodoftransport 73 Design File A Case History of Classic Textiles: Beryl Dean A history of Beryl’s working life researchedandwrittenbyBibiBerki 75 Curator’s Choice 17th century white leather gloves RosemaryHardentracesthehistoryofthe embroidered‘JonahandtheWhale’glovesfromthecollectionattheFashionMuseuminBath
COHABIT stunning interiors beautifully photographed 96 COVER STORY The Rajah Quilt The work of unknown female convicts Deborah Ward unravelsthestoryofwomenwhoproduced whilstonboardtheRajahship
ATTIRE critical reporting of fashion trends 24 COVER STORY Stylish sleuths From Sherlock Holmes to Nancy Drew, Beth Smith points out that fictional detectives are anything but plain clothed. illustratedbyChristyMcCafferty 46 COVER STORY All rise The evolution of legal dress HavelockJohnTeaguetakesustocourtand sharesevidenceofthehistoryofdresswornbytheranksofthebar,illustratedbySusyPilgrimWaters
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City sights From metres of fabric to feathered creations: London Design Festival highlights
The London Design Festival, now in its ninth year, just gets bigger and to mark this seemingly endless expansion the V&A are creating installations on a impressively large scale. During the city-wide event the Cromwell Street entrance to the museum will be dominated by a three-dimensional latticework spiral called ‘Timber Wave’ by award winning architectural firm, Amanda Levete Architects.
While inside the museum renowned milliner Stephen Jones has re-imagined, using computer scanning technology, a reproduction of the Museum's 1827 bust of Lady Belhaven, adding, of course, a contemporary hat.
Elsewhere visitors might struggle to choose which events to add to their itinerary although those with a predilection for textiles might take note that The Finnish Institute in London is presenting the UK premiere of REDDRESS. Designed by Aamu Song, co founder of Helsinki based design studio ‘Company’, the work is more than simply a dress; created with 550 metres of fabric, designed to accommodate 238 people, 20 metres in diameter and three metres high it provides an intimate space for performances and discussions.
In Regent’s Street Timorous Beasties will take over one of Liberty’s windows with a scheme featuring the ‘Liberty Bell’. There will be a moth trail through the store up to an installation on the 4th floor where the Bell Moth motif fabric will be sold by the meter as well as on a product line of cushions and lampshades.
Cole & Son will be launching its autumn 2011 collection, Geometric which revives ‘Op Art’ with geometry and explorations of colour, line, movement and illusion. Manufacturing wallpaper since 1853, Cole & Son will also host tea and a tour at its North London factory on Saturday 24 September. In the nine days of the festival it’s impossible to see everything but turn the page for further textile highlights... London Design Festival, 17-25 September 2011, 150 venues across the city, T: +44(0)20 7734 6444, www.londondesignfestival.com
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Art Institution ARTHUR BISPO DO ROSARIO FOUND FREEDOM THROUGH MAKING
The descendant of cane-farming slaves in one of the poorest parts of Brazil, Arthur Bispo do Rosário (1909?89) was at various times a marine, a boxer and a naval signaller, spending eight years in the Brazilian Navy. On 22 December 1938 he had a vision of Christ and seven angels, claiming they had entrusted him with the task of making an inventory of everything and everybody worth redeeming on the impending Day of Judgment.
He presented himself at a monastery and from there was sent to a hospital, where he was diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia. Eventually he was permanently interned in a psychiatric hospital colony outside Rio de Janeiro, and spent the last fifty years of his life there, sleeping only a few hours each night and spending the rest of his time producing the huge body of work he eventually left as his legacy.
Although knowing nothing of contemporary artistic movements and trends beyond what he might have gleaned from reading newspapers and magazines in the hospital library, the self-taught Bispo spontaneously produced a treasury that has been described as “part Surrealist, part Magic Realist and part Conceptual.” With the help of fellow patients, hospital staff, visitors, and others, he searched in cupboards, storerooms and dustbins and collected scraps of newspaper, wood, fabric, string, buttons, coins, bottles, shoes and countless other objects. He labelled, dated, and sorted every one according to complicated rules and colour schemes. From them he made sculptural models of everything from boats and cars to hand tools and a boxing ring, as well as showcase-like assemblages of this all-encompassing array of materials and objects.
These trademark assemblages of objects are
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Idle hands PRISON CHARITY FINE CELL WORK WON’T TOLERATE WASTE
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Practical, adjective: 1. Of or concerned with use of something. 2. Likely to succeed or be effective.
Ideals are wonderful things but without action they have a tendency to mutate into mere wishful thinking. It takes a certain type to person to turn an ideal into an organisation that has a real and direct impact on other people’s lives. Being too precious about methods, too careful of feelings or respectful of authority is a surefire way to get nowhere fast. Fortunately Lady Anne Tree, founder of Fine Cell Work, a registered charity that trains and pays inmates to produce fine embroidery and soft furnishings in prison, wasn’t burdened by such niceties. “One must fight dirty to do good,” the indomitable 82 year old told Peter Stanford in his interview with her for The Independent a year before her death in 2010.
It is fitting that a social iconoclast chose to champion those who had broken its rules but it wasn’t shared experience that prompted Lady Anne to work to improve the lot of prisoners. As second daughter of the 10th Duke of Devonshire and Lady Mary GascoyneCecil, Mistress of the Robes, hers was a privileged upbringing. Undoubtedly her position and connections served their purpose – it would have been wasteful not to use them – but that doesn’t mean Fine Cell Work was an overnight success. A sustained campaign – hours of letter writing and lobbying ministers – to be allowed access to prisons in the UK looked like it might end in failure when permission was suddenly granted in 1991.
When she was finally allowed in Lady Anne knew what to expect. It was her role as a prison visitor for four decades that made her realise she had a ‘calling’ to try and stem the tide of boredom and waste that is the human tragedy of prison.
Katy Emck, CEO of Fine Cell Work, began work with the charity 14 years ago. At the time she spent just one day a week on the ‘mad’ brainchild of Lady Anne Tree, assisting her and Robert Oakshot as they sought to establish the charity. She saw first hand the resistance to the cause. The thought of prisoners, particularly male ones, sewing was an odd one but the idea that they would earn money for their work was even more unpopular – there was a surprising level of prejudice.
Victorian notions of the ‘undeserving poor’ (in today’s terms ‘the underclass’) hampered efforts to promote the charity although its potential was clear. In an early experiment two ‘lifers’ in Holloway Prison stitched a needlepoint carpet which sold in New York for thousands of pounds. Yet the idea of the incarcerated being financially rewarded was disturbing. Today, when rehabilitation is often cited, the need for punishment remains. “The crux of the problem is the twin goals of punishment and rehabilitation are fundamentally at odds,” Says Emck. “Some argue prison is doomed to failure yet at the same time society has to be protected.”
Just when the debate threatens to become theoretical, pragmatism, the backbone of Fine Cell Work, reasserts itself. “For Lady Anne it was clear,” Emck recalls. “Diminishing the individual is counter productive and the cost to society is high. The sense of failure is crushing, even a strong person would struggle and many of the prisoners are not strong mentally. Most people now accept that 70% of the prison population have mental problems.”
The financial reward is virtually symbolic. “It’s not a fortune,” confirms Emck, “you couldn’t live on the income in the real world but it makes a crucial difference to the prisoners. Lady Anne did have a privileged background but she still understood the value of money, she saw that the prisoners need to earn something.”
Inmates can make up to £20 a week if they work up to 60 hours on a project for Fine Cell Work. “I’m a fast stitcher, so I reckon I can make £8 a week, so £500 a year…” explains one quoted in the charity’s “Stitching a Future” report. Participants use their money in three main ways; to send home, save and buy necessities (and luxuries) in prison.
The choice of embroidery as the means to effect change in the prison system makes it seem as though Lady Anne had Mahatma Gandhi’s “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win” quote in mind. People do snigger at the idea of 4
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The Triangle Fire THE TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST COMPANY FACTORY FIRE
141 Men and Girls Die in Waist Factory Fire; Trapped High Up in Washington Place Building; Street Strewn with Bodies; Piles of Dead Inside. New York Times, March 26, 1911 It’s a memorable headline by any standard and one hundred years later the Triangle fire is still remembered – for both the horror of the event and its legacy of workplace reform.
At the turn of the 20th century the Triangle Company factory made women’s blouses, and occupied the top three floors of a ten storey building in Greenwich Village, New York. Most employees were ‘greenhorns’ – recent female immigrants of Jewish or European descent, aged between sixteen and twenty-three. According to the New York Times report “Almost all were the main support of their hard-working families”. It was common practice for factories to exploit newly arrived women. They spoke little English and were unlikely to join groups such as the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) or the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) who fought for better working conditions and protective legislation. In cramped sweatshop conditions they stitched for hours for little money.
On the 25th March 1911 workers were coming to the end of a seven-hour shift when a fire broke out, probably in a fabric scrap bin, although theories about the cause of the fire range from a discarded cigarette to over-heating machines. Whatever the cause the fire spread rapidly – within 18 minutes 146 people were dead, 129 women and 17 men. Cornell University houses original documents on the Triangle Fire. Firsthand accounts by survivors are part of their expansive online exhibit and they reveal the catalogue of errors, oversights and deliberate neglect that led to the disaster.
The fire spread through the eighth floor and up to the ninth. Workers on this floor had the slimmest chance of survival: the fire escape was not worthy of the name and leading nowhere it buckled under the weight of workers. Those who crowded by windows watched as the firefighters ladders stopped several stories too short. Many decided to jump – down lift shafts and from windows rather than suffocate or burn. Passers by would never forget the bewildering sight of billowing skirts and the unspeakable sound as the young women hit the pavement. Why couldn’t workers leave by the doors? Because they were locked in.
After the fire, the factory owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were put on trial for manslaughter. Trial transcripts reveal the arrogance of the defence team. On 11 December 1911 Anna Gullo testified that the door to the Washington Place stairwell was locked. When also asked if during the period she was employed were there any fire drills in the factory the answer was a simple “No, Sir”. Seconds later the defence leapt up declaring the
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question “incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial”.
The defence secured the factory owners’ acquittal by arguing they had no prior knowledge that the doors to the stairs and exits were locked. In terms of compensation, it took two years for a few families to win, in today’s money, $268 each from Blanck and Harris, who in turn had been paid $1,430 per casualty by insurance. The Literary Digest published a rebuking editorial entitled 147 Dead, Nobody Guilty, in which the author is frustrated by the lack of action on the part of the authorities and the wider national press… “There are no guilty,” rails the journalist, “there are only the dead, and the authorities will forget the case as speedily as possible… Capital can commit no crime when it is in pursuit of profits.”
The case was never reopened, in spite of Blanck being arrested and fined a meagre $20 (roughly $70 today) for locking the doors to another factory in 1913.
Though the men responsible for the tragedy were not held accountable, New York state enacted almost 40 labor laws in the following three years. The American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) was founded, it was the first of its kind and still exists today. New York State also instigated the Factory Investigating Committee, which drew up a report in 1915 that modernised the state’s labour laws to the point where they were recognised as some of the most progressive in the USA. In 1935, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act to ease union formation and protect collective bargaining and the rights of striking workers.
As it says on the Cornell website, the fire and its horrors “epitomize the extremes of industrialism”. Interest has not abated: HBO aired a documentary, two days before the one hundredth anniversary of the blaze. It would be nice to think that in the last century we have eliminated the possiblity of such tragedies. But even the simplest internet search yields pages of results documenting the shocking conditions under which people are still forced to work. Last year The Observer reported cases of people in India working eight hours of forced overtime a day, for 25p per hour. These factories produced clothes for Next, Gap, and M&S.
There are policies, laws, and procedures put into place to prevent this happening, like the global Ethical Trading Initiative. In the media these are constantly referred to as ‘violated’, ‘disregarded’ and ‘breached’.
It would be foolish to assume that the atrocities of current sweatshops are confined to developing countries. The progressive laws put in place in 1915 as a result of the Triangle fire helped to significantly reduce their presence, but did not eradicate them. Laws covering employment, wage, and working hours are broken every day across the globe. Primrose Tricker www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire ies
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