Textile Designs: Two Hundred Years Of European And American Patterns

Looks at floral, geometric, conversational, ethnic, and art movements and period fabric designs

Never Before Has the universe of printed textiles had a book of this magnitude and lavishness devoted to it. Covering the past two hundred years, during which the industrial revolution drastically altered textile manufacture, Textile Designs: Two Hundred Years of European and American Patterns presents a dazzling cross section of the colorful patterned materials that decorate our rooms and clothe our bodies. These are the textiles of the common man, as opposed to the opulent woven silk brocades, damasks, and velvets that were, before the eighteenth century, almost the only beautifully designed fabrics available. While textile museums' collections tend to focus on these elite and costly examples or emphasize rarities, this volume deals extensively with the textiles of everyday life - the printed calicos and cottons, flowered cretonnes and chintzes, polka-dot silks and foulards. More important, textile museums and books about their collections organize the examples chronologically and geographically. Here, for the first time, is a method of categorizing that is unique and practical: fabrics are organized by motif irrespective of period. Revolutionary!

A rich and colorful resource in which glamour and usefulness are stunningly combined, this visual encyclopedia of design motifs groups textiles by pattern into five chapters under the headings FLORAL, GEOMETRIC, CONVERSATIONAL, ETHNIC, and ART MOVEMENTS AND PERIOD STYLES. These chapters follow an introduction that provides a brief discussion of printed textiles. Because of the widespread interest in the subject, this book is published in a worldwide English-language edition that includes translations of all of the pattern names as well as brief introductions in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese. Textile Designs will be indispensable to professionals in the apparel and home-furnishing fields everywhere, an inspiration to designers in the graphic and visual arts, a reference book for quiltmakers and collectors (nearly all the textiles illustrated are dated, and country of origin is identified), and a feast for the eye for lovers of the beautiful.

1,823 plates in full color