The exhibition "Andy Warhol: The Textiles" explores the beautiful and fascinating textile designs by the influential pop artist and icon Andy Warhol. Dating from his early career as a commercial designer and illustrator in the 1950s and early 1960s, Warhol’s textiles are now considered an important part of his body of work. These designs added considerably to his ability as an artist, which was then almost entirely devoted to realising the demands and deadlines of professional clients, leaving limited room for fantasy and vision.

The exhibition includes over 45 of Warhol’s textile patterns from the 1950s and early 1960s, depicting an array of colourful objects, ice cream sundaes, delicious toffee apples, colourful buttons, cut lemons, pretzels and jumping clowns exhibited both as fabric lengths, some in multiple colourways, and as garments. Some of the most important manufacturers in American textile history are also represented, such as Stehli Silks, Fuller Fabrics Inc., and M Lowenstein and Sons.

Photo @2022 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by DACS, London.

Fashion and Textile Museum
83 Bermondsey Street
SE1 3XF London

Contact: P : +44 (0)2 07 40 78 664
fashiontextilemuseum@newham.ac.uk
fashiontextilemuseum.org

A major exhibition celebrating the contemporary sari. Curated by Priya Khanchandani, this exhibition will unravel its numerous forms, demonstrating the sari to be a metaphor for the layered and complex definitions of India today. It will bring together dozens of the finest saris of our time from designers, wearers and craftspeople in India.

Worn as an everyday garment by some and considered by others to be formal or uncomfortable, the sari has multiple definitions. Conventionally an unstitched drape wrapped around the body, which can be draped in a variety of ways, its unfixed form has enabled it to morph and absorb changing cultural influences.

In recent years, the sari has been reinvented. Designers are experimenting with hybrid forms such as sari gowns and dresses, pre-draped saris and innovative materials such as steel. Young people in cities who used to associate the sari with dressing up can now be found wearing saris and sneakers on their commutes to work. Individuals are wearing the sari as an expression of resistance to social norms and activists are embodying it as an object of protest.

Today, the sari in urban India manifests as a site for design innovation, an expression of identity, and a crafted object carrying layers of cultural meanings. The exhibition will unravel the sari as a metaphor for the complex definitions of India today.

Photo: The Quilted Sari from the Huemn Fall 17 Collection, Huemn, 2017; photo Pankaj Dahalia; model Rachi Chitakara

The Design Museum
224 - 238 Kensington High Street
W8 6AG London
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