Tag Archives: 60s

Designing Women: Post War British textiles at the Fashion and Textile Museum

Posted in 50s, Jacqueline Groag, Lucienne Day, Marian Mahler by
Today, the final exhibition review for a while. Last Wednesday I went to Designing women: post war British textiles at the Fashion and textile museum.
The exhibition primarily focuses on the work of three designers; Lucienne Day, Jacqueline Groag and Marian Mahler.
There are a few pieces also by the designer Paule Vezelay, Mary White and Mary Warren.
There are some truly fantastic textiles on display at the exhibition, with the focus on textile design of these women from the 50s.
The exhibition here is more about interiors textiles rather than fashion textiles. I actually really enjoyed this myself ( I found it inspiring for how I would like to decorate my own home!) although I could tell some of the other visitors were a little disgruntled.
I would just say that if you have been to see the British design exhibition this works really well as a “follow up” and adds more detail to some of the design work seen within the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition.
Whilst I enjoyed this exhibition I did think that it felt a little empty and that they could have fitted the work of more designers into the space…but again this is just personal opinion (maybe some print designs by some of the great designers who worked for Horrockses like Pat Albeck, Brigitte Denhert and Joyce Badrocke???)
I would highly recommend this exhibition though and I’ll leave you with some of the multitude of pictures I took (a great thing about the FTM they allow you to be as snappy happy- flash off of course- as you like)

 Lucienne Day “Too many cooks” and “good food”

  Lucienne Day “Trio”

  Lucienne Day “Herb Anthony”

  Lucienne Day

 Marian Mahler “Sails”

 Marian Mahler “Bird chair”

 No details

 Jacqueline Groag “Aquarius”

 Jacqueline Groag “Good morning” and “Family outing

Paule Vezelay “Harmony”

 Mary Warren “Spinners”

Mary White “Coppice”

Celia Birtwell book: A review and investigation

Posted in 70's, celia by

For Christmas I received a rather delightful book that I had wanted for a while the new book on Celia Birtwell. What I like about this book is that it is a real marriage between beautiful images of original garments, Celia’s prints and tales from the time. It gives you an insight into Celia’s life and also  helps you to better understand her prints. It not only gives an insight into her heyday in the late 60s and 70s but brings you right up to the present. For any print aficionado I cant recommend it highly enough.

I have a bit of a book obsession. This is my book shelf in my uni house. Almost all of these books are about fashion history with a few books dotted in about some of my other random obsessions too (graffiti, mid century typography Dali and Gaudi feature heavily)

What I also really liked was that it gave me a few more clues into the interesting links between Alice Pollock, Ossie Clark, Quorum and Radley. Which has been one of my big vintage obsessive research areas of the past six months.

Reading the book helped me to uncover something really interesting. This is the Celia prints on Radley dresses debate. Something that I’d long known about was that Ossie was fiercely protective over Celia’s designs and whilst designing for Radley Celia rarely produced any designs for Radley which were not on Ossie dress designs. Why therefore does the odd definite Celia print occur on Radley dresses without the magic Ossie name too?

Well, the book sheds some light on this Ossie stopped working with Radley in 1973 but Celia continued to work with Radley (producing 2 fabric collections a year) until 1976. It would appear therefore that those unmistakable Celia designs that are sometimes seen on Radley dresses without the accompanying Ossie name date between 73-76. Helping me to date my own lovely Celia Birtwell print dress.

The book helped me further with this dress too. Whilst I’m still not 100% sure of the exact print it is definitely one of her bouquet prints which were some of her most popular designs.
I love a good bit of fashion investigation, and I highly recommend purchasing this book too!