April seems to be a particularly busy month for textile events, so I am splitting this across two blogs – this one and then another next week.
On Thursday 1 April the Royal Society for Asian Affairs hosts a talk by James Crowden, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, on Mr Consta and the Oriental Carpet Manufacturers.
This is a “terrifying yarn about the geopolitics of carpet making, from the burning of Smyrna in 1922 to Partition in Amritsar in 1947, via Athens, Leeds, Vichy France, Tabriz, Kerman… and Dorset. The view from one Greek/French/British family involved up to the neck for over 120 years…… The Moderator for this talk will be Antony Wynn, author of Three Camels to Smyrna, the history of the Oriental Carpet Manufacturers, for which he worked as a buyer in Iran in the 1970s.” – RSAA website. Click here to register for this talk which begins at 14:00 BST.
On Wednesday 7 April Selvedge will be hosting an evening of discussion on the topic of African wax print, followed by the screening of a documentary film. Participants in the discussion include Adaku Parker of Dovetailed London, whose company brings together African fashion and British design. Joining her will be Dutch designer Simone Post, who has worked on a range of prints for Vlisco. Despite strong quality controls, things can sometimes go wrong in a manufacturing process with 27 separate steps. “Safeguarding their quality standard, Vlisco cannot bring the misprints to market. Only the best of the best goes to Africa.” – Simone Post’s website. Simone realised that the rejected fabric could in fact be repurposed and used in an entirely different way. She is now developing a range of high-quality rugs from this waste material.
The final participant is Anne Grosfilley, a French anthropologist who has undertaken over 20 years of fieldwork on the African continent. She is the author of many articles, as well as several books on the subject. I particularly enjoyed reading this interview with her by Godfrey Deeney in Fashion Network in which they discuss the collaboration between Dior and Uniwax, a company on the Ivory Coast that uses traditional methods and local African cotton.
The discussion will be followed by a screening of the film Wax Print by the Nigerian-British filmmaker Aiwan Obinyan. Full details of this event can be found here. It starts at 18:00 BST and you can register for it here.
The opening of the major exhibition devoted to chintz at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London has been delayed until 18 May 2021. The exhibition of 150 textiles has been organised by the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands. I will blog about this in more detail nearer the time.
In the meantime the museum has organised several events to whet your appetite. The first of these takes place on Thursday 8 April at 18:00 BST. This is an online talk by Honorary Senior Research Fellow Mary Schoeser, entitled The Flowering of English Chintz: 1800-1875. “This online lecture demonstrates how designs changed over the period, as well as highlighting the importance of women as consumers, whose tastes were informed by new trends in gardening and collections of botanical prints. Mary will also illustrate the chintzes that were criticised as bad taste and reveals whether that made them more of less popular.” – Museum website. Click here for more information and to book.
The following day, Friday 9 April at 13:00 BST there is an opportunity to meet the curators involved with the exhibition during an illustrated panel discussion which will be chaired by Dennis Nothdruft (Head of Exhibitions). Panellists will include Mary Schoeser, who was responsible for the Victorian Chintz and its Legacy section of the exhibition, and Gieneke Arnolli, who was curator at the Fries Museum for almost four decades. There will be an opportunity to see several of the images from the exhibition as well as to learn more about its conception and the history of chintz. Click here for more information and to book for this curator talk.
On Saturday 10 April Historic Deerfield will host a one-day virtual forum entitled Invisible Makers: Textiles, Dress, and Marginalized People in 18th- and 19th- century America.
There will be a series of lectures by “a dynamic roster of academic and museum professionals discussing examples of the important roles and contributions of BIPOC textile and clothing producers and consumers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Presented as case studies, the research includes textiles and clothing produced by forced labor within plantations; people of color working as tailors and dressmakers in Massachusetts; and marginalized people who fashioned their dressed bodies using Anglo-European garments in ways that both subverted normative styles while expressing “other” cultural identities.” – Deerfield website. Recordings of each session will be available to those who register for two weeks after the event, so it doesn’t really matter if you are in a different time zone. More information can be found here.
Kimono for a young woman (furisode), 1905–20, probably Kyoto, Japan. © Khalili Collection, K106
Many members were looking forward to the OATG visit to the V&A’s blockbuster exhibition Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk, which we sadly had to cancel. We are delighted that our April speaker will be the curator, Anna Jackson, Keeper of the Asian Department. In this talk Anna will take us on a fascinating journey from the sophisticated culture of seventeenth century Kyoto to the contemporary catwalk and reveal some of the stories behind the exhibition. This is certain to be a very popular talk so I strongly suggest you register for it early. Members have already been sent a link to the booking form. Registrations for non-members will open next Friday (2 April) and I will include a link in my next blog.
©Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Finally, in January I blogged about a series of interviews that the Textile Museum were hosting on a variety of topics – eighteenth century dyers, Andean textiles, Oriental carpets in Portuguese collections etc. I’m delighted to say that the recordings of these sessions are now available to watch at your leisure. Make a cup of coffee, get comfortable and click here to watch them.
Oxford Asian Textile Group blog 
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