Since I recently wrote about super-labor-intensive Japanese picture ikat, I thought that it would be fun, this week, to feature an imitation ikat fabric that I designed in 1976 for Wollman Industries, NYC. My fabric is shown above, next to a photo, in an unidentified catalog, of a skirt that was made from it (left).
The fabric was a yarn-dyed cotton (woven in western Pennsylvania) that I designed to look as much like a hand-dyed, handwoven Mexican textile as possible. My faux-ikat cloth was mostly tabby with irregular, supplementary-warp ikat-like motifs edged by 3/1 raised twill stripes. Since all of the non-tabby ends were sleyed more densely than the tabby ends, this was not a cheap knockoff and in fact it was probably pretty expensive fabric. The pattern sold very well in red and in other colorways, two of which are shown below:
The 1970s were turbulent years for the New York textile industry. Wollman was my first solo design job, and they had hired me during a painful recession. Although I didn’t know it at the time, Wollman was in, or was soon to be in, Chapter 11, and almost as soon as I started working my salary was cut and the merchandiser whom I was counting on for help left the company.
We were competing not only with much bigger companies from lower-wage states, but also with two-dollar-a-yard cottons from India, so the market prospects for five-dollar-a-yard cotton fabrics weren’t promising.
But one of the benefits of being a designer in a small, family-owned business like Wollman was that I had almost unlimited creative freedom to come up with new and fashionable designs to entice the apparel manufacturers who were Wollman’s customers. I was extremely anxious about my — and the company’s — survival but somehow ended up doing some of the best and most spontaneous (read panicked) designing that I’ve ever done. I don’t recommend fear as a motivator, but in this case, it probably was.
Below is a rare picture of me, from that period, taken at Wollman by my boss.
Designer (me) at work
I wasn’t always as cheerful at work as I look in this photo, but it seems to me, now — all things considered — that it was a pretty good gig.
I just loved the story AND the cloth. Great designing!
Bonnie, Thank you. Your comment is especially meaningful to me since you make such beautiful REAL ikats.
Your designs are beautiful, Fern, such lovely balance and harmony of colors and form. Thanks for sharing the photo, that’s how I remember you from those earlier times…
Eva
Eva, I’m speechless. Thank you.