The clothes we wear, the sheets we sleep on, the carpets beneath our feet. Textiles are everywhere; we can’t escape them. That’s what this show at the Fashion and Textile Museum sets out to explore: the long-running connection between us, the earth, and textiles, in just about every sense of the word.
As the exhibition points out from the get-go, we humans have relied on woven fabric to perform practical tasks for millennia, weaving reeds together to create vessels, protecting our delicate little heads from the hot sun with wicker hats and making nets to catch fish. They are the global artform. We use textiles to express our individuality through clothing, to tell stories and mark life milestones. We also use them, the exhibition argues, to communicate our deep, inherent love of animals, to show evidence of abstract thought and to interact with technology.
It sounds impressive on paper, but in practice, this exhibition lacks depth. There are certainly some beautiful, intricate, intriguing objects here: a ‘three-factorial’ weave inspired by betting odds, strings of shiny beetle wings, an applicé wearable art coat and a hand-painted Chinese wedding cloth showing a hare preparing the potion of eternal youth with a mortar and pestle. But it hops swiftly between multiple cultures and time periods, making vague points illustrated with what sometimes seems like a random assortment of objects, mainly from the last century (the most rare, and one of the oldest pieces in the collection, is a knot-pile carpet fragment showing a baroque-style sun with facial features, made by orphans and commissioned by Louis XIV in the 17th century). If it’s textiles you’re after, you’d do equally as well saving your pennies and spending your afternoon looking around the V&A’s permanent collections.
