Pictured clockwise from top left: Issey Mikake’s signature pleated designs, Knoll Textiles and an images from the Scraps: Fashion, Textiles and Creative Reuse exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum
Celebrating Textiles in NY
We’re halfway through New York Textile Month, but there are still plenty of events on the schedule for textile and fashion fans. The newly launched event celebrates the textile research and design process, as well the environmental impact of the textile production process.
Created by trend forecaster Li Edelkoort, New York Textile Week acknowledges the “debilitating lack of knowledge concerning textiles” in the world of art and design “at a time when textile heritage is at a crossroads and centuries of tradition and knowledge are being compromised.” The month-long event aims to “investigate and celebrate the survival of the different textile components and expressions.”
There are textile-themed exhibitions at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum the Children’s Museum of the Arts, as well as the textile and fashion exhibitions ongoing at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
There will be textile demonstrations, including an installation demo of the pleating technique designer Issey Miyake employed in his Pleats Please Issey Miyake collection at the Issey Miyake store in SoHo.
Edelkoort will lead an all-day seminar on textiles for fashion and interiors on Sept. 20 at The New School.
Also on Sept. 20, Marimekko Artwork Studio Manager Petri Juslin will lead a discussion on the impact of hand printing on Midcentury pattern design at the Marimekko flagship store on 5th Avenue
Designtex, a company known for its research and development into “textiles and wallcoverings with reduced environmental impact” will organize a human loom to weave a large-scale fabric on the north end of Washington Square Park on Sept. 23.
In concert with the Scraps: Fashion, Textiles and Creative Reuse exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, designer Christina Kim will host a workshop on Oct. 1 on “visible mending—a style of repair that calls attention to signs of wear and the care that is taken to preserve things.” Kim, founder of Los Angeles-based fashion brand dosa, will later that day join Reiko Sudo, director of Tokyo textile design firm Nuno, and Luisa Cevese, founder of Milan-based accessories and home goods company Riedizioni, in a panel discussion moderated by Matilda McQuaid, the Cooper Hewitt’s deputy curatorial director and head of textiles. The four will discuss alternative approaches to the “high human and environmental costs of textile industry waste.”
You can find more information about New York Textile Month at the NYTM website and at Dezeen magazine.
