Local Fabric

Mid-Century Modernisms, Textile and Fashion Design, and the Northwest Coast, 1940-1967

Bibliographic Data

ID5828601
AuthorsLaura J Allen (0000-0001-9420-2647, Montclair Art Museum, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume13
Issue2
Pages52-52
Publication date2024-03-11
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueArts (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2076-0752 • E-ISSN: 2076-0752
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/arts13020052
OpenAlexW4392662306
LanguageEN
References cited28

In the mid-twentieth century, growing North American textile and ready-to-wear industries vigorously appropriated Native American aesthetics to cultivate a commercial and design identity apart from Europe. Most studies of the circulation of Indigenous idioms in these industries focus on Southwestern or South Pacific regionalisms, and scholarship on studio and commercial fabric and fashion design from the Northwest Coast in the twentieth century is limited. This paper contributes by raising Indigenous and non-Indigenous use of Northwest Coast design forms during the politically turbulent 1940s-1960s and analyzing the impact of this aesthetic vocabulary within broader North American textiles and fashion. Throughout, I engage with the approaches of critical fashion theory and multiple modernisms, considering the frictions of property and power relations within settler-colonial states, then and now. Drawing from study of objects, periodicals, and archival materials as well as first-person perspectives, I contextualize these representations within entangled art, museum, and design worlds in the Northwest Coast, New York City, and the Southwest. My examination illustrates that Northwest Coast artists and art ideas asserted a peripheral but locatable role in mid-century textiles and fashion, facilitating the development of today's robust Indigenous fashion network on the Northwest Coast and its cultural politics

Textile · Textile design · Architecture, Design, and Social History · Crafts, Textile, and Design · Fashion and Cultural Textiles

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