Word: fabrics
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...were obliged always to appear in white and never to wear the same toilette twice. Worth even felt a heavy obligation to the French silkmaking industry. When crinolines became so enormous as to be dangerous to the wearer, Worth concocted the bustle as a way to use quantities of fabric without incarcerating his clients...
...drawn at the proper angle to the light before the outline of the animal is even suggested. The effect is cunning, quixotic, magical, and knows no boundary in time. The cloth, in fact, dates only from the mid-20th century, but the tiger, fashioned from phantom stripes of fabric, was tie-dyed with supernal skill, millimeter by millimeter, by a craftsman whose techniques were passed down over 1,200 years. The lace of Chantilly seems, by comparison, fussy and overemphatic. That tiger prowls with the power...
...Costumes of Royal India," of which this fabulous piece of cotton is just a small part, springs into New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art with a vitality and dignity well beyond that of most exhibitions of clothing. All is ravishment: a child's coat made of silver fabric embroidered with gold thread; a woman's costume of veil, tunic and pajamas that plays with sunset shades of gold and violet. Fashion and society are the prevailing standards that squeeze museum costume shows tight, but "Costumes of Royal India" celebrates an ongoing tradition--of craft, of coloration, of symbolic...
...resist the impact of a coat--cut for a maharajah who stood 6 ft. 9 in.--made of silk and interlined, for warmth, with rustling handmade rag paper. All that captures the eye. But what holds the imagination are the shapes, the folds and the colors, the cascades of fabric in a skirt that uses 300 yards of cotton to move over the wearer like a light wind or that spills around her, when she sits, like a mountain lake. The gold glitters, but what seduces are the accents of color that the gold picks up and reflects, like...
...earth tones) and partly too from what Curator Singh calls "the fugitive color palette"--the homespun miracle that would occur when a villager, out of necessity, dyed and redyed the same piece of cloth. Serendipity and splendor then: fashion as tradition. Fashion, indeed, as the warp of the social fabric...