“There are very few stories left to tell about Andy Warhol,” said the late Matt Wrbican, former chief archivist of the Pittsburgh museum dedicated to American pop art’s greatest proponent. “But textiles is one of them.”
A new exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London, together with a book by the curators, changes that. They showcase for the first time Warhol’s lost and virtually undocumented designs for dress fabric, which the artist produced in New York during the booming postwar years of the late 1950s to the early 1960s.
These 33 designs for silk and cotton are delicate, repeat patterns of innocent pleasures: wobbly ice creams, skittish butterflies, tumbling clowns, fruits and pretzels, rendered in candy-cane colours and frequently drawn in Warhol’s favoured dainty, ink-blotted style. They celebrate the joys of consumerism, and are clear antecedents to the silk-screened soup cans and Coke bottles that would later define Warhol’s career.