The Masters' Art on Dress Fabric: A Shanghai Exhibition That Makes You Think About the History Behind the Print

An exhibition at Modern Art Base tells that history. We also talked about fabric with Zandra Rhodes, the only artist and designer in the show who is still alive.

In March, Modern Art Base put on an exhibition called Artist Textiles: Picasso to Warhol. The pieces came from the Fashion and Textile Museum in London — the museum's first showing in China.

The exhibition runs chronologically, tracing how art and fabric design came together over the 20th century: the shift from Painting on Paper to Painting on Textile.

It opens with "fine art enters textile design" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Modernism was gathering pace, and the art world had begun arguing about how art might fit into everyday life. Many artists — chief among them William Morris, Britain's "father of the Arts and Crafts movement" — looked for ways to bring artistic practice closer to ordinary people. So they turned to design, and above all to the art of designing mass-produced textiles.

Between 1910 and 1939, artists from Fauvism, Futurism and Constructivism joined in. Art and social life gradually merged, and textiles became one more way for artists to say what they had to say. But the two world wars got in the way, and it was not until the 1940s that art and textile design combined on a large scale.

Postwar Britain and the United States were reviving socially and culturally, and with that came energy and an openness to new ideas. The 1940s may have been the most productive decade for artists working in the textile trade. Surrealism was then the most fashionable, most popular movement in art, and artists carried that style into the design of clothing fabric.

The Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí worked his style into fabric for ties, silk scarves and dresses. He put his signature melting clocks on a red tie; he designed the silk scarf What Number, Please?, in which telephone symbols creep toward the center of the image; and he put a "floral ballet" pattern on a silk-screen printed rayon "pebble crepe," which was made into a dress.

The Fauvist painter Henri Matisse, inspired by a trip to Tahiti in 1940, made a series of works featuring sea creatures. The exhibition showed Shawl No. 1, a silk-screen printed silk head scarf from that series.

In 1946, a coalition of the British government, textile manufacturers and designers put on an exhibition at the V&A Museum in London called Britain Can Make It, showing off British industrial design, textiles included. Visitors could look at these distinctive designs but not buy them. Britain was still under wartime austerity, so manufacturers aimed at markets abroad, above all the United States.

In the mid-1950s, Fuller Fabrics Inc. of New York worked with famous 20th-century artists on a series called Modern Masters. The patterns came from the artists' own works; Fuller handled production and printing. The point was to make fashion fabric in bulk and sell it at $1.50 to $2 a yard (one yard ≈ 0.91 meters). The artists called the effort Art for Inches — "art for the people" — and Picasso was among the first to take part.

Picasso, 70 by then, had already designed two scarves. One, made in 1950 to raise money for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, carried a bull, a sun and plants; only 100 were made. The other, designed in 1951 for the Berlin Peace Festival, carried a dove of peace and four heads, and was given to the students and young people who attended. Picasso had always refused to work with commercial firms, so both designs were small runs, done for nothing.

After those two, Picasso caught the enthusiasm for this new medium — designing on textiles. In 1953, at the invitation of Fuller Fabrics, he joined the Modern Masters project. An art movement aimed at the public and priced by the yard suited his politics. He wanted art to be more than something hung on a wall for rich people to admire; through new work in different media, it could belong to everyone.

For the project Picasso spent more than a year learning to work in fabric — dyeing and printing, paring motifs down, adjusting how they looked, studying patterns — and ended up with textile designs such as the rooster and the little bird. His pull in the art world drew in other well-known 20th-century artists one after another: Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall and Joan Miró.

British artists threw themselves into the same movement of "designing on textiles" at the same time.

In 1953, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London held Paintings into Textiles, a milestone in how postwar Britain thought about textile design. Most of the artists in it came round to the new idea of fabric as a medium for art. Henry Moore, Donald Hamilton-Fraser, William Gear and Eduardo Paolozzi showed abstract works there. The exhibition spread the notion that textile design is a way of making art. Many of the works were later put into commercial production by David Whitehead, a textile mill in Lancashire, England.

The British painter Paule Vezelay, who had designed a great deal of fabric for the British brand Heal's, judged the movement this way: "By bringing in painting-inspired design, the whole standard of textile design has been raised in a most interesting way. They are no longer purely commercial products, but a bridge between commercial art and fine art."

The fifth section of the exhibition, "The Little-Known Picasso: America in the 1960s," showed what Picasso made for textile projects.

In the early 1960s, at 80, Picasso took on the second commercial collaboration of his life. Working with Bloomcraft Fabrics of New York, he produced eleven brightly colored furnishing fabrics in a range of materials; the series sold for about $5 a yard.

Picasso also went beyond color and pattern to the cloth itself, working with the American ski-wear maker White Stag on an après-ski line. Several of the patterns from that collaboration went into printed corduroy capes, PVC-coated raincoats, cotton sweatshirts and women's culottes, selling for $9 to $30.

Pop Art arrived around the same time. Artists and designers such as Andy Warhol and Zandra Rhodes brought popular taste into textile design.

Before Andy Warhol made his name as a master of Pop Art, he worked as a graphic designer. Early on he published illustrations in more than 400 different magazine issues and worked in advertising, drawing for women's shoes and perfume. In those years he put animals, fruit, clowns and buttons into textile designs, and had some of the fabric made up into clothes. Working on fabric in the 1950s — by silk-screen printing — later fed his Pop Art.

Zandra Rhodes, the only artist in the exhibition still living, came to public notice as the movement was ending. In 1964, Top Brass, her piece in the Royal College of Art graduation show, was bought and put into production by the British furnishings brand Heal's. That graduation piece was on display here.

Then there is Rhodes's most popular design, the "Lipstick" pattern from the 1960s, drawn from a Dior beauty advertisement. The exhibition showed a silk-screen printed silk dress made from it. In 2017 Valentino bought the Lipstick design for its haute couture line, reworked it and put it on the market.

The exhibition lays out 60 years of textiles, fabric and clothing, from the end of the First World War to the Cold War, and with them the era's social changes, moods and values. It is also a history of history and design tangled together, in which a new medium for art brought artists, manufacturers and consumers into the same room.

By the late 1970s and the 1980s, this half-century-plus of fabric and art was over. Today "cross-industry collaboration" is unremarkable, and since most textiles are now made in Asia, "this kind of symbiotic relationship won't happen again, at least not in the same way."

Zandra Rhodes

Born in 1940, she studied at Medway College of Art and then the Royal College of Art, specializing in printed textile design. Her work is called dramatic yet elegant, bold yet feminine. She appears in public with pink hair and theatrical makeup, and is known as the "Princess of Punk."

As a fashion designer, Rhodes has dressed Princess Diana and Freddie Mercury and Brian May of Queen. In 1995 she set up a studio in California and moved into home furnishings as well.

In 2003 she founded the Fashion and Textile Museum in London, devoted to clothing, fashion and fabric. In recent years the museum has staged a number of themed shows, among them "Fashion and Freedom," "Orla Kiely: A Life in Pattern," "Artist Textiles: Picasso to Warhol," "Josef Frank: Patterns – Furniture – Painting," "The Jazz Age: Fashion and Photographs of the 1920s," and "Knitwear: Chanel to Westwood."

On March 2, Zandra Rhodes gave a talk at Modern Art Base about the Fashion and Textile Museum and some of her own designs. Excerpts from the audience Q&A follow.

Q: As a fabric designer, how do you know whether a fabric design is any good? Is there a standard?

A: You make a design, and you hope it catches on, you hope someone will want to wear it. When you put it on the market, you hold a small hope that it might be commercially accepted. Some designs might not be commercial at all. In 1971 I made some garments with holes in them, and only about a dozen sold at the time. Sometimes only history can tell you whether a thing is good or bad, or people only see its value later.

I came up as a fabric designer, and I try to sell my work. People might say, I don't want to buy it, it isn't commercial. But I believe in my own designs. I hated teaching, so I thought I had better stick to design. Luckily, design has worked for me. But not every piece sold. Some never sold at all. As a designer, when you are making the work, you don't think about success or failure — sometimes people love a thing at the time, and a few years later they don't like it at all.

Take Dalí. When he designed his work, he simply made it as good as he could. Some people used it as a scarf, which is what it was; others saw a piece of art and hung it on the wall. Once the work actually reaches the market, it might catch fire, or nobody might care at all — hit or miss.

Q: Fabric design looks very meaningful in hindsight, but today's market seems to ignore it completely. A brand might use a single fabric design, one pattern, to stand for the whole brand. What do you make of that?

A: That is fashion. Whatever people are drawn to is what it will be. If it sells, it gets copied more. If it doesn't sell, it drops like a stone.

As a designer, I have always thought you are a gambler. If I make a design nobody wants to wear, that is bad luck. Anyone who wants to be a designer has to grow a very thick skin and be ready to be laughed at. But I believe that if you are sincere and you simply keep at it, it pays off in the end.

We Talked to Zandra Rhodes About Design, Fabric, the Exhibition and "Designing on Textiles"

Q: QDaily

Z: Zandra Rhodes

Q: What made you think of starting the Fashion and Textile Museum, and of putting together "Artist Textiles: Picasso to Warhol"?

Z: The exhibition shows different artists printing their work onto textiles, which is wonderful. Two collectors put these pieces together, and then they put me in as well. Now I am the only person in the exhibition who is still alive.

I started the Fashion and Textile Museum because, as a textile designer, I felt people were not giving fabric the recognition it deserves. A garment looks good partly because of its fabric. That is why I built the museum, and I also wanted to show British designers, because many of them never got the chance to be seen.

Q: How should we understand "textile" as the exhibition uses the word?

Z: Because I am a fabric designer, I would say fabric matters most. It is easy to wear a dress with a very simple shape, but the print is what makes the garment stand out.

Q: Much of the fabric in the exhibition is silk-screen printed. Did fabric flourish in the 20th century because of advances in technology?

Z: Decades ago, silk-screen printing was a way to get art to more people. It was a wonderful idea — letting people own their own Andy Warhol or Picasso garment.

I think it is a very good, very interesting idea, and it shows how much fabric matters. This exhibition shows how art lived on fabric and how people wore it. As a fabric designer I am certainly biased, but I think it shows the beauty of fabric, and how art became something the public could wear.

Q: As part of that movement, how did it feel to see "art on fabric" accepted by more and more people?

Z: I think fabric design can be art. The fabrics in the exhibition were used as curtains, or as patterns people wore. This was a time when people wanted more art in their lives. So they could hang it up, or own their own Dalí or Picasso, or have it made into clothes.

What matters most, I think, is that people started to take an interest. People started buying these fabric designs because they were Picasso's. That is a better outcome than I expected, and it gave fabric value. I have always felt people did not give enough credit to fabric design and to the designers behind it.

Q: I have seen you say your inspiration often comes from traveling. Is that still true? Has coming to Shanghai this time given you any new impressions?

Z: When I travel, I don't have to stay in constant touch with my office. I have time to look at things, observe them, think about them. That is wonderful for me.

This is my second time in Shanghai. The last was in 1979, when the streets were all army green and navy blue, and there was nothing on them but bicycles. There weren't so many tall buildings then.

Now I think China is one of the most exciting countries. I love seeing everyone dressed differently, everyone's own personality in what they wear. And seeing the people who came to the exhibition, with their young and distinctive eye — that is wonderful.

Q: I see you have a website called Digital Study Collection, holding more than 500 of your classic designs. The site says you want students all over the world to see your work. What advice would you give young designers today, if you have any?

Z: That is a project I did with a university, the University for the Creative Arts, where I am an honorary professor. I wanted people to be able to see my work, and it is also an online archive for students doing related creative research. This year I am publishing a book that will show my work from the past 50 years.

(As for advice for young designers) — passion, hard work, and friends around you who like to work hard. It will not get any easier, but it is exciting. And in China I think it will be more exciting than anywhere else, because you will become the leaders, while the world slowly moves on from me.

Q: The exhibition covers a stretch of history, from the Surrealism of the 1940s to the Pop Art of the 1960s, and you yourself designed the conceptual chic collection in the 1970s. How would you describe the style of right now?

Z: The conceptual chic was my punk collection, in 1977, with safety pins and holes in the designs. I had always worked in flowing chiffon, and then all at once I wanted to try fabric with holes, bean-shaped ornaments and safety pins.

The present is hard to describe. I think the trend now is very casual, very relaxed — things like the bomber jacket lead it. It is not the elegant, chic style of before.

Q: Does that affect the way you dress? Or is your own style fairly settled by now?

Z: Nothing in fashion stays the same. I try to think about how to reinterpret everything through my own eye. There is no point in following other people, because people want to see Zandra Rhodes's style. So every year it is a challenge — to make a look that still looks like me.

Q: Is painting on textile different from painting on paper?

Z: You paint on paper first, and then you have to work out how to reproduce it on cloth — you rethink things like how to lay the pattern out and at what scale. Then I hold the fabric up to a mirror and against myself.

The cover image is Dalí's silk-screen printed silk head scarf The Ballerina (cropped); the banner is Marc Chagall's Delicate Flower; photographs in the text, unless otherwise noted, were taken on site by QDaily.