QUILT ENHANCEMENTS
Laura Fisher, a textiles dealer in Manhattan, knew that the e-mail announcement for her winter show would often end up in spam filters. She nonetheless gave it an attention-getting title, “Male Enhancements,” based on Viagra ads.
Her 30 quilts in the show are made of fabric from men’s clothing, including socks, neckties, long johns, shirt and pant cuffs, haberdashery labels for brands like Wear-Weev and Man-Brooke, and military uniforms and ribbons. Ms. Fisher, who runs her gallery out of overflowing storage units inside Hayes Storage and Logistics on East 61st Street, finds the artifacts full of “mystery and unanswered questions,” she said.
An Indian tailor working for British colonial regiments perhaps studded her checkerboard of pastel uniform scraps ($19,500) with sequins and gold braid. A church group may have raised funds by selling a quilt with rectangles from men’s suits ($3,800), embroidered with religious slogans and congregants’ names in spidery letters.
On a brown and tan blanket ($1,275) stitched for a toddler named Wesley, pink embroidered butterflies, cats and fruit contrast improbably with the macho fabric palette. Shimmering rayon used for vest linings runs along the back of a tweedy textile ($4,000), as if the quilter set out to imitate pragmatic suit construction. The squares on a brown and ivory quilt ($3,500) are arranged in giant bowties, as if in homage to the menswear theme.
“I look for the compositions that have thought, concept and planning behind them,” Ms. Fisher said. “They aren’t just sewn together.”
New York , New York -- 26 October 2010
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"Eye Dazzler" (Laura Fisher at Fisher Heritage) |
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"Log Cabin" (Laura Fisher at Fisher Heritage) |
New York City antiques dealer Laura Fisher will present visually distinctive antique quilts pieced from menswear suiting in an autumn exhibition and sale “MALE ENHANCEMENTS: Suit-able Quilts." The collection pays homage to the design inventiveness of quilters who turned woolen menswear fabrics into powerful American textile folk art. They will be available at FISHER HERITAGE, 305 East 61st St, 5th Floor (the Hayes Warehouse), October 11 - December 31, 2010; Monday-Friday, 11:00 am - 4:00 pm.
"This year both in fashion and home furnishings, menswear is suddenly 'hot" say editors who seem unaware of the history of menswear in America. For over a century in NYC’s garment industry, for example, manufacturing had flourished in every aspect of menswear production from fabric to finished garment. Sadly today most of that industry has disappeared overseas. These suiting quilts are thus a unique legacy and a powerful link to that heritage," Fisher notes. And, to thank the American Folk Art Museum for designating NYC's “Year of The Quilt", these antique suiting quilts are a cheeky acknowledgement to the good news that despite its financial issues, the Museum remains open for business.
Wool suiting, work clothing, or military uniforms make up these darker, some nearly monochromatic, quilts. They are unfamiliar to and had been dismissed by a collecting public for whom the quilt stereotype is one fashioned from pretty calico prints. But according to Fisher "menswear quilts are a new discovery for collectors, and at last are accorded respect across the globe as an indigenous textile art."
These materials were typically salvage -- what would be hailed as 'green' today - because they recycled waste woolens such as: suiting swatches from which the clients of tailors and fabric houses chose material for coats and pants; or cutting room remnants left from clothing manufacture; or no longer wearable family garments. Resources for the twills, tweeds, serges, gabardines and scotch plaids were outdated swatch books, or sacks of scraps from clothing construction that factories offered to workers and quilters. In some droll examples we can recognize the shape of the pants cuffs or sleeve ends that a tailor removed when shortening garments! And of course quilters used worn clothing, including even sturdy khaki from military uniforms no longer in service.
Often suiting quilts are a symphony in texture and weave rather than color contrast. The rectilinear compositions in charcoal gray, navy, black, camel or olive call to mind the modernist art work of painters like Sean Scully. While many antique ‘swatch’ quilts were simply set in rows without any design plan that might capitalize on the scraps' color variations, examples in this exhibition are dramatic graphic exceptions.
The menswear quilt phenomenon had a brief but historic presence in the U.S. It paralleled the emergence of the ready-made clothing industry across the country during the Industrial Revolution, and ebbed about a century later. Today because nearly all textile and clothing manufacturing operations have moved overseas, this menswear quilt style can never again reemerge here as it had proliferated from the mid-1800s through the mid- 1900s. As a result, this historic quilt bounty is newly appreciated. Transcending their utilitarian origin, thanks to their handsome palette and tonal sophistication they are a studied aesthetic with a fascinating back story.
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