LONDON.- The Fashion and Textile Museum is showing the exhibition The Fabric of Democracy, an exploration of printed propaganda textiles.The industrial age mechanised the textile industry, revolutionising print techniques. Elaborate imagery on cloth could now be produced with more detail and at a faster pace than ever before. These increasingly affordable processes ‘democratised’ textile decoration, allowing governments, regimes, and corporations to harness the power of print to communicate, from wartime slogans to revolutionary ideals.
Curated by design historian Amber Butchart, The Fabric Of Democracy, explores how fabric designers and manufacturers have responded to political upheaval from the French Revolution through to Brexit, illuminating visitors on how textiles have been used as a tool of the state across the political spectrum, from communismto fascism. Discover how a fraternal crisis in the monarchy played out on cloth, and how democracies promote national identity through textile design.
On display are circa 150 textiles and objects from countries including Britain, America, Italy, Germany, and Austria, ranging from French Toile de Jouy to Japanese robes from the Asia-Pacific war, and Cultural Revolution-era Chinese fabrics which have rarely before been exhibited in the United Kingdom.
Amber Butchart, Guest Curator: ‘When people hear the word ‘propaganda,’ it’s not usually textiles that spring to mind. But fabrics have been used to spread political messages for centuries, both on the body and in the home. Through this exhibition, I wanted to explore how printed cloth has been used as a medium to convey ideologies, highlighting that textiles can be powerful communicators and that domestic settings can be just as political as public spaces.’
Dennis Nothdruft, Head of Exhibitions: ‘The Fabric Of Democracy explores the intersection of printed fabric and political messaging. The technological advances in the manufacture of textiles have enabled propaganda to enter the domestic sphere, to find a place as part of people’s lives and identities.’
Amber Butchart is a curator, writer and broadcaster who specialises in the cultural and political history of textiles and dress. She is a former Research Fellow at the University of the Arts London and is a regular public lecturer across the UK’s leading arts institutions. She researches and presents documentaries for television and radio, including the six-part series A Stitch in Time for BBC Four that fused biography, art, and the history of fashion to explore the lives of historical figures through the clothes they wore, and she is the history consultant and regular on-screen historian for BBC One’s Great British Sewing Bee. Amber is an external adviser for the National Crime Agency as a Forensic Garment Analyst, working on cases that require investigation of clothing and textiles. She has published five books on the history and culture of clothes, including The Fashion of Film, Nautical Chic, and a history of British fashion illustration for the British Library.
The Fashion and Textile Museum is the only museum in the UK dedicated to showcasing contemporary fashion and textile design. The Museum is committed to presenting varied, creative and engaging exhibitions, alongside an exciting selection of educational courses, talks, events and workshops. In place of a permanent display is a diverse programme of temporary exhibitions, displaying a broad range of innovative fashion and textiles from designers and makers around the world. Recent exhibitions at the Fashion and Textile Museum have included ‘Andy Warhol: The Textiles’, ‘Kaffe Fassett: the Power of Pattern’,‘150 Years of the Royal School of Needlework: Crown to Catwalk’, ‘Beautiful People: The Boutique in 1960s Counterculture’, ‘Chintz: Cotton in Bloom’.
The Fashion and Textile Museum
The Fabric of Democracy
September 29th, 2023 - March 3rd, 2024
