Museum Of Costumes And Textiles

An alluring, opulent showcase of hundreds of beautiful historic clothing items and accessories“High Style is filled with fashion inspiration and information. . . . Nearly every page…includes a captivating photo of one of the collection’s lavish garments or accessories.”—Threads   Published for the first time in paperback, this lavishly illustrated volume originally appeared in 2010 to celebrate the transfer of the Brooklyn Museum’s historic costume collection to The Metropolitan Mus... [Read More]

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Kente is not only the best known of all African textiles, it is also one of the most admired of all fabrics worldwide. Originating among the Asante peoples of Ghana and the Ewe peoples of Ghana and Togo, this brilliantly colored and intricately patterned strip-woven cloth was traditionally associated with royalty. Over time, however, it has come to be worn and used in many different contexts. In Wrapped in Pride, seven distinguished scholars present an exhaustive examination of the history of ke... [Read More]

This wonderfully illustrated volume presents over 50 textiles and garments from the Textile Museum of Canada's collection of 19th and 20th century artifacts made in Japan for both everyday and occasional use. Luxurious silk and gold fabrics produced in Kyoto s professional weaving workshops are juxtaposed with domestic indigo-dyed cotton, plant-fibre cloth, and silk kimonos crafted in an astonishing spectrum of time-honored techniques - weaving, dyeing, hand painting, gold foil application and e... [Read More]

This is the first publication on a remarkable collection of sixty-six outstanding Pueblo and Navajo textiles donated to the Peabody Museum in the 1980s by William Claflin, Jr., a prominent Boston businessman, avocational anthropologist, and patron of Southwestern archaeology. Claflin bequeathed to the museum not only these beautiful textiles, but also his detailed accounts of their collection histories--a rare record of the individuals who had owned or traded these weavings before they found a h... [Read More]

In this beautifully illustrated book, textile expert Elena Phipps examines the ancient Peruvian process of weaving textiles with four finished selvages, or edges. Without cutting a thread, master Peruvian weavers wove each textile to the specifications of its intended use, whether a child’s garment, royal mantle, or ritual cloth. This weaving technique required the highest level of skill and forethought and reflects a high cultural value placed on maintaining the integrity of cloth―not only ... [Read More]

"I have rarely met someone as vivid, as alive, as vital, vivacious, irreverent, joyous, relevant, and needed as Iris. She breathes young air, thinks young thoughts, and gathers no dust. I simply adore her."--Dries van NotenA unique and lavishly illustrated collection of musings, anecdotes, and observations on all matters of life and style, infused with the singular candor, wit, and exuberance of the globally revered ninety-six-year-old fashion icon whose work has been celebrated at the Metropoli... [Read More]

Q'ero is an isolated indigenous community in southern Peru, on the eastern slope of the Andes. In this harsh environment, a rich and complex textile tradition, the chief artistic expression of the Q'ero people, has endured from pre-Hispanic times. Woven from the hair of local alpacas, the colorful shawls, ponchos, bags, and other textiles produced are worn daily and form part of the rituals and ceremonies of Q'ero. Examining the textile traditions that are distinctive to Q'ero within those of th... [Read More]

Navajo Textiles provides a nuanced account the Navajo weavings in the Crane Collection at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science—one of the largest collections of Navajo textiles in the world. Bringing together the work of anthropologists and indigenous artists, the book explores the Navajo rug trade in the mid-nineteenth century and changes in the Navajo textile market while highlighting the museum’s important, though still relatively unknown, collection of Navajo textiles.In this unique col... [Read More]

Intrigued with the possibility of integrating texture in his work, American landscape photographer Robert Glenn Ketchum has a long-standing collaboration with the Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute (SERI) in China. This splendidly designed volume describes the history of SERI with illustrations of its traditional embroidery and then proceeds to pair Ketchumís stunning photographic images with their exquisite embroidered counterparts. Essays locate the achievement of the Suzhou Embroidery Rese... [Read More]