WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE. PRINTED FABRICS: DRESSES AND SCARVES 1920 – 1990

Exhibition curator: Konstantina Hlaváčková
Exhibition design: Pavel Mrkus
Graphic design: BFF – Adéla Bierbaumer a Marek Fanta

We no more imagine a world without cloth than one without sunlight or rain (Virginia Postrel, The Fabric of Civilization, 2020)

The exhibition explores printing on textiles, one of the oldest disciplines in textile production. Printed fabrics are examined from multiple angles: as a bearer of trends in art, and as a material for making clothing and scarves, which besides their role as fashion accessories can also convey a variety of messages.

Each fabric has its own story – the story of how it was made, and its aesthetic and human elements – and this story is in some sense unique. The exhibition seeks to document the complex relationships between printed fabrics, fashion, history, and human individuality. A common thread in all this is tracing the development of individual types of patterns over the decades, and the intersection of artistic, technical, and ideological influences.

The exhibits fall under two main categories. The first features clothing that demonstrates the most widespread printed patterns, which now have a permanent place in the fashion world. As trends in fashion have evolved over time, these patterns have been used in various ways and with varying degrees of intensity. The clothes are grouped according to this key, based on the dominant forms: polka dots, stripes, stylised flowers, patterns inspired by cashmere, and geometric or abstract motifs.

The second category focuses on the printed scarf, which is presented not just as an accessory but above all as something that besides its practical function can surprisingly play other roles based on its potential as a blank canvas. In this way a scarf can become an authentic historical document, a memento, a medium for advertising or propaganda, and an object that documents developments in fine art and can be described as “wearable art.”

However, printed fabrics can also bear testimony to tragic moments in history, in the form of flags, camouflage for military technology, armbands to designate friend or foe, or the Star of David that Jews had to wear under Nazi rule.

The articles on display became protagonists in events and stories about which, with few exceptions, we know nothing today. We have to accept that these stories are lost forever.

The exhibition represents just a small part of the wealth of printed textiles at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, supplemented in 2011 by the extensive collection of the Textile Museum in Česká Skalice, and it also includes many items on loan from the Imperial War Museum in London and a private British collection. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication of the same name.