As New Yorkers bask in the midst of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week’s fall 2011 collections, the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. has chosen its own timely focus for 2011: the link between textiles and environmentalism. The very first show in the program, “Second Lives: The Age-Old Art of Recycling Textiles,” opened this month and runs through January 8, 2012. The exhibit reveals 18 gorgeous repurposed fabrics from around the globe, all part of the museum’s permanent collection and exploring why and how cultures across the centuries have reused and recycled fabrics. These textiles were given second lives to extend their value, such as a wall hanging pieced together from scraps of worn silk that were too precious to throw away.
The textiles on view are from the eastern and western hemisphere and date from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Patchwork hangings are from Uzbekistan, India, and Iran, while Japan and South America bring us textiles woven with recycled fiber. The Pacific Northwest coastline and Turkey offer up garments constructed from discarded religious textiles.
Throughout history wealth and status have been communicated through luxurious garments which, when too threadbare to be worn, were often repurposed into something else. For example, ceremonial mantles or cloaks were sometimes cut into pieces and distributed as gifts by the Tlingit, Tsimshian, and Haida tribes of the Northwest Coast. The gifts were often turned back into garments themselves not without creativity, as we see in one green-and-brown vest on view. Panels from Qing dynasty Chinese robes – which took skilled artisans two or three years to complete – were sometimes salvaged and repurposed as wall hangings.
The enduring beauty and skilled craftsmanship of the works on view isn’t the exhibition’s only draw, though the aesthetics are striking. Many of the textiles tell fascinating stories of traveling between and across cultures, carrying within them layers of meaning and social significance. Woven velvet panels from 16th-century Persia made their way to Ottoman Turkey, where they adorned the tent of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent. Next, the same panels traveled from Turkey to Poland in the 17th century and became part of a noble family’s sled blanket used into the 1920s.
Often the sensibility and functionalism of the reuse creates it own story. For example, a Buddhist religious text got covered with a repurposed high-status imperial Chinese military badge, while an Islamic shrine covering was transformed into a vest. Across all 18 works on view, diversity and creativity are born out of age-old frugality and practicality. Of course patchwork, quilting, and vintage scavenging still exist today, but these methods aren’t nearly as widespread. Perhaps the bulk of today’s textiles, churned out by factories for mass consumption at H&M or Forever21, aren’t worth salvaging. Consumerism has made clothes and textiles less precious, which makes “Second Lives” even more significant.
For more information: The Textile Museum, 202-667-0441; http://http://www.textilemuseum.org/.
