Book Alert: Alastair Morton and Edinburgh Weavers by Lesley Jackson (V&A Publishing) |

The fashion industry may have jumped on the Scottish designer bandwagon a few years ago. Yet Scotland had stronger, deeper and less bland connections with the fashion industry decades before Christopher Kane was even born.

Many of us may automatically think about historical mills and tweed producers, but Edinburgh actually boasted one of the most visionary textile companies around.

Founded in the '20s, textile firm Morton Sundour opened an experimental unit called Edinburgh Weavers a decade later. Headed by visionary artist Alistair Morton from 1931 until his death in 1963, the company specialised in printed and woven furnishing fabrics and was often commissioned by architects to design fabrics for specific interior design projects.

Yet this isn't the main reason why Edinburgh Weavers soon turned into a unique company: Morton often commissioned cutting-edge painters and graphic artists to create designs for the textiles, spawning a series of collaborations with over one hundred and fifty designers.

Among the others artists called in to collaborate there were also Cecil Collins, William Scott, Keith Vaughan, Elisabeth Frink, Marino Marini, advertising artist and designer Ashley Havinden, designer, painter and photographer Humphrey Spender, and textile designers Lucienne Day, Marion Dorn and Hans Tisdall.

A book by the Victoria & Albert Museum's publishing house, entitled Alastair Morton and Edinburgh Weavers and written by curator, design historian and author Lesley Jackson, allows us now to rediscover the history of the company.

The volume includes over 400 images of textiles, most of them in colour and all taken from the Victoria & Albert Museum’s archive, and chronicles the history of the company and of the career of Alistair Morton, a very inspirational and visionary multi-talented artist, textile designer and weaver who created innovative designs not only for Edinburgh Weavers, but also for Horrockses.

Working closely with famous exponents of abstract art such as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, Morton pushed the boundaries of textile design, producing avant-garde pieces.

Morton, who supported Nicholson when he published in 1936 an international survey of Constructivist Art entitled Circle, even launched a year later a range of experimental Constructivist Fabrics, including textiles by Nicholson, Hepworth, Eileen Holding and Winifred Dacre.

Leafing through the volume, readers will easily realise that Morton's designs and the fabrics created in collaborations with avant-garde painters, designers and sculptors were extremely modern and can still provide us with interesting inspirations (check out for example the last image in this post, Victor Vasarely's 'Oeta' furnishing fabric, 1962, from the V&A Archive).

Yet, if you're a fashion or textile designer, try to be inspired not only by Morton's experimental creations and collaborations, but also by the most important lesson he left us: always introduce new designs, most of them ahead of public taste.