Printed Fashions: Textiles for Clothing and Home

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, early printed textiles with their luminous colors and attractive designs were widely sought for fashionable clothing and home furnishings. Eighty examples of these stunning printed cottons and linens, many of which have never been exhibited before, are featured in "Printed Fashions: Textiles for Clothing and Home." The exhibition illustrates the design, history and techniques of printed textiles during this formative era. These objects played their own important role in history, not just for their obvious aesthetic qualities, but also for their economic importance as trade goods and as examples of technological advances.

Although fashionable Indian chintzes had inspired European printers to begin developing competing technologies as early as the seventeenth century, it was during the eighteenth century that most of the technical advances were realized. Rather than using the Indian method of painstakingly hand-painting chemical fixatives (known as mordants) and then dyeing the textiles, Europeans developed labor-saving techniques to expedite the process. Blocks, coperplates and rollers allowed printers to apply patterns at a faster rate, often with delicate and intricate linear effects rivaling prints on paper. Experiments with chemicals yielded pencil blue and china blue techniques to solve the difficult challenges of patterning textiles with indigo blue.

"Printed Fashions: Textiles for Clothing and Home" is certain to fascinate and delight decorative arts aficionados, fashion historians and design enthusiasts, who will appreciate the many patterns that could easily have modern interpretations.

This exhibition was made possible through the generosity of Mary and Clinton Gilliland and the Turner-Gilliland Family Fund of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation; the DeWitt Wallace Fund for Colonial Williamsburg; and Mr. and Mrs. Jay E. Frick. Ellan and Charles Spring funded the purchase of mannequins.