Textiles Today: A Global Survey of Trends and Traditions

By Chloe Colchester

Textile design is both one of the least and one of the most localized of the arts. Textiles owe their development and evolution to religion, commerce, and travel, and their vibrant and creative preservation to tenacious regionalism. In the recent past, artists and designers from different backgrounds--India, Mali, Madagascar, Morocco, Burkina Faso, Nigeria--have reinvigorated art and fashion by using the fabrics and graphic elements they find on the streets of New York, Paris, London, and other cities to project an alternative vision of textile culture on the international stage. The diversity of the textile world makes it both exciting and provocative as it brings together a wide range of otherwise fragmented images and perspectives. Extraordinary technological developments, from color-changing, light-sensitive camouflage to emergency shelters of cement-impregnated fabric bonded to an inflatable plastic, are included here alongside the simply beautiful, such as Eley Kishimoto's patterns that point to the historical exchange of ideas between the East and the West, or the astonishing color transmutations of Morphotex, a fiber of multilayer optical interference.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0500513813
• ISBN13: 9780500513811
• Release Date: October 2007
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 2.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 9.7" x 10.3"

Customer Reviews

The history of these textiles' invention and changing use makes for a fine coverage of trends and cu

TEXTILES TODAY: A GLOBAL SURVEY OF TRENDS AND TRADITIONS surveys a rapidly-changing global arena of fabrics and textiles, considering collaborative projects between fabric makers and fashion designers and offering plenty of photo examples of new textiles and their applications. The history of these textiles' invention and changing use makes for a fine coverage of trends and cultural traditions in a title highly recommended for any college-level collection.