Let's continue the bed linen designs thread that started with yesterday's post to focus on patchwork covers and quilts as inspiration for fashion collections. Certainly this is not a new idea, as proved by previous Raf Simons' collections for Calvin Klein, but it is the way each designer interprets a particular inspiration that makes a difference in the history of fashion.
Today's post starts from St Fagans National Museum of History, Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales in Cardiff, Wales. The museum boasts a collection comprising over two hundred examples of quilting and patchwork. Among them there is also the Wrexham Tailor's Quilt (1842-52).
This quilt was made by a military master tailor from Wrexham, James Williams, and it features intricate intarsia Biblical scenes in a palette of blue, red, brown and grey.
The scenes include Adam naming the animals, Jonah and the Whale, Noah's Ark with a dove bearing an olive branch, and Cain and Abel. There's also some architectural references in the quilt, used to hint at the Industrial Revolution with Thomas Telford's Menai Suspension Bridge (opened in 1826), a Chinese pagoda, and Cefn Viaduct, near Ruabon, with a steam train.
The materials made for the geometrical patches, for those chevrons, squares and rhomboids (in total there are 4,525 separate pieces of cloth in this quilt), came from felted woollen cloths, possibly off-cuts of broadcloth from military uniforms.
It took James Williams a decade to finish the piece as he worked on it in his leisure hours. The quilt was therefore a way to chronicle Biblical events and scenes from the Industrial Revolution, but it indirectly became a tapestry of an artisan's life, a testament to his passions and skills.
It was therefore only natural for Sarah Burton to move from this inspiration for her Alexander McQueen A/W 2020 collection. Burton has developed a strong fascination for rediscovering techniques from the past and reinventing them in her modern designs. In this case the quilt was translated into a patchworked single-breasted coat and a sharp trouser suit, both cinched at the waist with leather belts and accessorised with metal hip-flasks.
Both were made upcycling British worsted wools from McQueen's A/W 2019 collection that paid homage to British mills and military flannels from other past seasons. The fabrics were employed to recreate the mood of Williams' quilt. The garments feature indeed appliqued motifs of animals, including a dove, a panther and a horse. The designs, in a palette revolving around red, ivory, grey and black, are constructed using a formidable amount of fabric pieces (901 in the case of the coat).
Patchwork is not a new technique for this fashion house (the late McQueen used it in some of his designs, for example in the "Deliverance" collection that entered the history of fashion for its dance marathon presentation), but in this case it took a unique twist.
There were further Welsh inspirations in the collection including the red shade, a colour often employed to ward off evil, and the traditional spoons carved from a single piece of wood. This love token was transformed into embroidered motifs in guipure lace and incorporated in a showpiece, a dress covered in love spoon embroidery, encrusted in crystals, sequins, beads and bullion thread work.
Yet the quilts remain the main protagonists of this collection: Burton's moodboard for this collection featured a lot of samples of traditional quilts and fabrics, but also photographs or men, women and babies wrapped in shawls and blankets.
The Welsh quilts and blankets in the collection of Jen Jones were for example employed as the starting point for the leather coats and asymmetrical dresses with leather panels draped as if they were tartan shawls for that added punk warrior touch.
The traditional Welsh blankets and quilts were also transformed into a coat, a skirt and a bag in a soft pink shade, pieces that highlighted the dichotomy at the bottom of this collection between softness and hardness, fragile beauty and strength, tailored designs and supple wool fabrics, sharply cut leather coats and soft blanket coats.
Some of the designs included in this collection called to mind the quilted petticoats that became rather popular in the 18th century in Europe and that were usually integrated in dresses with open front panels that provided another layer of detail. Such petticoats were mainly employed to make the garment warmer and to give shape to the lower half of the body disguising the wearer's legs.
The ornate beauty of the early quilted petticoats with their three dimensional depth was replicated in Burton's designs for McQueen.
The online archive of the National Museum Wales offers quite a few examples of traditional Welsh quilts. The latter are usually easily recognisable from other types of quilts as they are characterised by a large central elements like a diamond-shaped figure, surrounded by other motifs and by two or three borders, usually integrating patterns representing leaves, spirals and geometrical designs.
Among the most notable ones from this archive there is a wholecloth quilt made in 1890 by an itinerant quilter (a common sight in rural west Wales in the past) at Trefigin Manor Farm, in the parish of Monington, Pembrokeshire. The quilter would visit annually the establishment to make and repair bedding and clothing for the family.
A silk velvet wholecloth cot quilt from 1938 was instead probably made by the Abertridwr Quilters - one of six quilting groups established by the Rural Industries Bureau to revive the art of quilting in the depressed south Wales valleys.
This quilt features a top cover of peach coloured fine silk velvet and a back cover of matching crepe de chine, with a quilting pattern characterised by a central diamond containing a large eight petalled floral motif (known as the "Abertridwr star").
Then there is also a wholecloth quilt made in 1951 by Emiah Jones (1888-1961) of Cross Hands for a quilting competition held at the Welsh Folk Museum with a top cover of light green cotton poplin and a backing of stone coloured poplin and a quilting pattern with a central diamond.
James Williams made his quilt almost to reunite the Industrial Revolution with his craft, and while the former threatened his job and the power of artisanal work, he managed to reconcile the two concepts in his piece.
You could argue that's the way forward also for what regards our times: rediscovering art, crafts and traditions (especially now that Coronavirus has limited our movement and it is forcing us to think more in local terms) and combining them with technological inspirations and innovative techniques can indeed lead designers to intriguing creations like the ones featured in this collection.
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