The Russian Fashion Blog Soviet Textiles : Wearable Propaganda

Merci @mad_meg !

En tirant le fil,…

blog initial (?) juin 2012
The Russian Fashion Blog Soviet Textiles: Wearable Propaganda
▻http://www.russianfashionblog.com/index.php/2012/06/soviet-textiles-wearable-propaganda

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What can be a more stunning example of fashion and politics going hand in hand?

These textiles were produced in limited quantities during the early years of Soviet Russia by the finest designers of that time. Despite being a manifestation of constructivism they look surprisingly modern and fun to me. I was delighted to see Tata Naka revisiting this wonderful piece of history in their F/W 2002-03 collection. Today, when everybody is crazy about prints, I hope more designers would draw inspiration from this gorgeousness!

Soviet textiles : designing the modern utopia : selected from the Lloyd Cotsen Collection (Livre, 2006) [WorldCat.org]
▻http://www.worldcat.org/title/soviet-textiles-designing-the-modern-utopia-selected-from-the-lloyd-cotsen-collection/oclc/71004542

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Between 1927 and 1933 a fascinating experiment in textile making took place in the Soviet Union. As the new nation emerged and the Communist party struggled to transform an agrarian country into an industrialized state, a group of young designers began to create thematic textile designs. They believed that by mass-producing fabrics depicting locomotives, factories, and other symbols of collective modernity for clothing and household use, they could mold the buyers into ideal Soviet citizens. While the experiment ultimately failed as propaganda (the ideal citizens clung to their traditional floral motifs), it yielded many bold and intriguing new designs. Soviet Textiles: Designing the Modern Utopia presents some forty of these textiles and discusses the political and artistic contexts that gave rise to them. Author Pamela Jill Kachurin identifies major themes and motifs that permeate the designs: industrialization, transportation, electrification, youth, agriculture and collectivization, and sports and hobbies. In the final account, few of these designs ever saw mass production; but their graphic power - and their value as elements of artistic and social history - is undiminished

Lloyd Cotsen, Collector of the Ordinary and the Odd, Dies at 88 - The New York Times (17/05/2017)
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/business/lloyd-cotsen-collector-of-the-ordinary-and-the-odd-dies-at-88.html

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If you had called Lloyd Cotsen a collector, he might have corrected you and said that he was really an accumulator. With an eclectic eye, he accumulated Japanese bamboo baskets, small pieces of textiles, bronze Chinese mirrors and illustrated children’s books.

Collecting beguiled him as a child when he amassed baseball cards and matchbooks. The habit continued when he was a Navy lieutenant on layovers; an executive at Neutrogena, the skin and hair-care company his father-in-law founded; and a man of great wealth, after he sold the company to Johnson & Johnson in 1994 for $924 million.

“I buy things because they strike an emotional bell, they appeal to my curiosity, to the thrill of discovery of the extraordinary in the ordinary,” Mr. Cotsen told The Denver Post in 1998. “They appeal to my sense of humor, and to my search for the beauty in simplicity.”

He added, “I decided I had a collection when there was no more space to put anything.”

By the time he died at 88 on May 8 in Beverly Hills, Calif., Mr. Cotsen (pronounced COAT-zen) had donated about half of the material in his collections to institutions like the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Princeton University and the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, N.M.

Fragmentary Tales: Selections from the Lloyd Cotsen “Textile Traces” Collection | LACMA (exposition en 2014)
▻http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/fragmentary-tales-selections-lloyd-cotsen-%E2%80%9Ctextile-traces%E2%80%9D-co

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Visually and intellectually compelling, textile fragments hold clues and tell stories about the past. An excerpt from the extensive collection of fragments assembled by Lloyd Cotsen, this exhibition presents mysterious and tantalizingly incomplete segments of textiles from throughout history and from around the world, from Peru to Uzbekistan to China and representing a span of more than 2,000 years.

Fragmentary Tales traces a collector’s interest in pattern, color, and texture; the tension between chaos and order; and the exquisite trace of what was once a masterpiece, now isolated because of time or circumstance.

Examining these fragments out of any context is instructive, and Cotsen seeks to share his wide-ranging collection with the public to challenge the visual experience of objects. Despite existing as remnants of a whole, each fragment reveals much about its purpose, method of construction, and aesthetic sensibility of its time and place.

CFAR – Cotsen Foundation for Academic Research
▻http://cfarfoundation.org

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The Cotsen Foundation for Academic Research (CFAR) is dedicated to expanding both public and scholarly knowledge of the arts, making the renowned art collections of Lloyd Cotsen, businessman, collector, and philanthropist, accessible to museums and the academic world.

“All of these objects strike some emotional bell within me, they appeal to my curiosity, to the thrill of discovery of the extraordinary in the ordinary, to my sense of humor, to my search for the beauty in form and simplicity.”

Lloyd Cotsen

Les autres collections…

Merci pour avoir tiré le fil @simplicissimus