Tag: Textiles

This Was Village Life in Britain 3,000 Years Ago

Three millenniums ago, a small, prosperous farming community briefly flourished in the freshwater marshes of eastern England. The inhabitants lived in a clutch of thatched roundhouses built on wooden stilts above a channel of the River Nene, which empties into the North Sea. They wore clothes of fine flax linen, with pleats and tasseled hems; […]

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Iris Van Herpen’s Exhibition Is a Dazzling Couture Show

It is possible that the most dazzling couture show in Paris this week is not actually taking place on a runway at all, but in an entirely different sort of setting. Possible that said couture show is not an invitation-only affair with gold ballroom chairs and the latest celebrity du jour, but rather one open […]

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Where Textile Mills Thrived, Remnants Battle for Survival

In his 40-year career, William Lucas has seen nearly every step in the erosion of the American garment industry. As general manager of Eagle Sportswear, a company in Middlesex, N.C., that cuts, sews and assembles apparel, he hopes to keep what’s left of that industry intact. Mr. Lucas, 59, has invested hundreds of thousands of […]

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In an 18th-Century Tavern, a Different Kind of Holiday Market

When the English chef Clare de Boer, 34, opened her restaurant Stissing House in Pine Plains, a sleepy village a two-hour drive north of New York City, in 2022, she envisioned it as a quieter, slower counterpoint to her acclaimed Manhattan restaurants, King and Jupiter. Housed in a Revolutionary War-era former tavern beside the town’s […]

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In Shetland, the Hottest Event of the Year Stars Sheep and Knitters

The sheep came spilling over the hillside, emerging through the low mist where the green earth touched the gray sky, running down into the fields below. They were ready for their big moment. It was Shetland Wool Week, and visitors from around the world — most of them women and nearly all of them knitting […]

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Columbia Sportswear Is Scouting Factories in Central America

Stan Burton wandered the Guatemalan factory like a prospector probing for buried treasure. His company, Columbia Sportswear, had long relied on plants in Asia to make its clothing, but that appeared increasingly precarious. A trade war undermined the benefits of using Chinese factories to keep Americans stocked with windbreakers and fleece pullovers. The disruptions of […]

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Sarah Burton’s Final Collection for Alexander McQueen

At the end of the Alexander McQueen show, after Naomi Campbell had strutted by in a silver beaded dress with a heart-shape breastplate of a bodice and a skirt dripping in loops of fringe, and the audience had risen to its feet in a standing ovation, the designer, Sarah Burton, came out to take her […]

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Fiber Art Is Finally Being Taken Seriously

IN FEBRUARY OF 1969, by a first-floor window that looked out on 53rd Street, the Museum of Modern Art in New York installed a work by a then-34-year-old artist named Sheila Hicks called “The Evolving Tapestry: He/She” (1967-68). Made of more than 3,000 “ponytails” of linen thread, as the artist called them, stitched together and […]

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The Threads of Identity in Palestinian Embroidery

In every stitch, there is a story. Like layers of history, the hand-stitched Palestinian embroidery known as tatreez, traditionally used to ornament Palestinian dress, tells of towns and villages lost, old customs abandoned, past lives and survival. The stitched designs and symbols once functioned almost as an identification card. The rooster, an old Christian symbol, […]

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