A recent visit to the Museum at FIT exhibition Art x Fashion sent me looking for a book on artist-designed textiles. At the exhibition, I was especially struck by "Spring Rain," a textile designed by Salvador Dalí - it was surreal and unexpected, something so far removed from innocuous floral prints and polkadots. It led me to the book Textile Design: Artists' Textiles 1940 - 1976, which documents a remarkable period when artists, textile firms, and fashion entered unusually fertile ground.
What draws me to these artist-designed textiles is not simply their visual inventiveness, but the proposition behind them: that art did not need to remain isolated from daily life. In the mid-century, there was a broader belief that art, design, and industry could be in active conversation. Artist-designed textiles seemed to embody that idea - works by Picasso, Dalí, Chagall, or Warhol could enter the home through furnishings, wallpaper, or garments. Art became, for the people.
What also fascinates me is that designing a textile poses such a different challenge than creating a painting. A print must contend with repeat, scale, legibility, and how it reads when cut into a garment. It places fine art in dialogue with illustration, graphic design, and industrial production. That formal challenge may be part of what made these collaborations compelling to artists like Pablo Picasso or Warhol, both of whom moved fluidly across media.
It also seems significant that textile firms such as Fuller, Bloomcraft, and Schiffer Fabrics were not passive manufacturers. They actively sought out artists, understood their cultural significance, and helped position textiles as a modernist venture.
Here are a few of my favorite textile prints discovered in this book:
"Spring Rain" by Salvador Dali for Schiffer Prints:
Picasso's "Fish Print" realized in a dress by Claire McCardell:
"Mothballs and Sugar Lumps" by Edward Steichen:
This print started from Steichen's photography of ordinary objects carefully placed and beautifully lit. I've long been interested in this kind of shift myself - when everyday objects become abstracted. NOT's own textile print inspired by nitrile rubber gloves is one such example!
Zandra Rhodes - "Mr. Man and All over Neon" :
Bloomcraft's advertisement of Picasso prints:
Love this ad! Picasso's sense of humor showed in another press feature where it was announced that the textiles were "suitable for every form of decoration, except upholstery. By the maestro's wishes, Picasso's may be leaned against, not sat on."
What made this period special was not simply that famous artists designed fabrics, but that manufacturers, museums, and the public seemed to share a belief that modern art could belong in everyday life. After the 1970s, for many reasons - shifts in manufacturing, changing relationships between art and industry, faster fashion cycles - fine art and industrial textiles became more separated again.
That may be part of why this period feels so resonant to me. I've always believed that clothing and textiles carry ideas; that they can be a meeting point between art, industry, and everyday life. The proposition that emerged so strongly between the 1940s and 1970s - that art could enter daily life through many different forms - still feels full of possibility.
Credits
All images courtesy of the book: Textile Design: Artists' Textiles 1940-1976 by Geoffrey Rayner, Richard Chamberlain, and Annamarie Stapleton.