TEXTILES TODAY - A Global Survey of Trends and Traditions

The diversity of the textile world makes it both exciting and provocative as it brings together a wide range of otherwise fragmented perspectives.

Textiles owe their development to religion, commerce, exchange and travel, and their vibrant and creative preservation to tenacious regionalism. Artists and designers from India, Mali, Madagascar, Morocco, Burkina Faso and Nigeria have reinvigorated art and fashion by using the fabrics and graphic elements they find on the streets of London, Paris and New York and other cities.

Extraordinary technological developments, from colour-changing, light-sensitive camouflage to emergency shelters of cement-impregnated fabric bonded to an inflatable plastic, are included here alongside the simply beautiful, such as Eley Kishimoto’s patterns that point to the historical exchange of ideas between the East and the West, or the astonishing colour transmutations of Morphotex.

A former design consultant, Chloë Colchester received a doctorate in anthropology for her research into Fijian barkcloth and was a research associate at University College London where she studied contemporary transformations of Polynesian cloth traditions. She is the author of The New Textiles: Trends and Traditions and Clothing the Pacific.

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