The hunt for Andy Warhol’s rare fabric designs

“There are very few stories left to tell about Andy Warhol,” said the late Matt Wrbican, former chief archivist of the Pittsburgh museum dedicated to American pop art’s greatest proponent. “But textiles is one of them.”

A new exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London, together with a book by the curators, changes that. They showcase for the first time Warhol’s lost and virtually undocumented designs for dress fabric, which the artist produced in New York during the booming postwar years of the late 1950s to the early 1960s.

These 33 designs for silk and cotton are delicate, repeat patterns of innocent pleasures: wobbly ice creams, skittish butterflies, tumbling clowns, fruits and pretzels, rendered in candy-cane colours and frequently drawn in Warhol’s favoured dainty, ink-blotted style. They celebrate the joys of consumerism, and are clear antecedents to the silk-screened soup cans and Coke bottles that would later define Warhol’s career. 

“Fun, ridiculous even, idiosyncratic and perfect for the period,” says co-curator Richard Chamberlain. “Warhol had a joyous sense of colour at that time and a faux-naive depiction, which is one of the reasons he was so successful.”

Retailers turned Warhol’s designs into women’s garments fit for a 1950s lifestyle of leisure and pleasure — very Warholian themes. On display in London are gorgeous examples, full of wit: a ruched bathing suit swarming with butterflies; a watermelon-print sundress; a cocktail jacket in a fabric design of lemon slices; a cleavage enhancing gown covered in cherry-topped sundaes. One full skirt is covered in a pencil print — a pencil skirt that is not a pencil skirt.

Chamberlain is a London-based textile collector who, with co-curator and author Geoffrey Rayner, spent more than a decade sifting and foraging through online auctions and vintage shops to track down examples of Warhol’s textiles, then authenticated them with whatever manufacturing records they could find. 

Long before Campbell’s Soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, Warhol made his first fortune in commercial art, running a multidisciplinary studio throughout the 1950s cranking out everything from magazine illustrations to window displays to record covers (“I can draw anything,” as he once said).

It was a lucrative business, allowing the impoverished son of central European immigrants to afford longed-for flannel suits from Brooks Brothers and a Lexington Avenue brownstone stuffed with antiques. 

“But with textiles, he gave designs to agents who handled them on his behalf, and who sold them to companies who did not necessarily promote his name or credit him at all,” says Chamberlain. “He wasn’t well known as a popular painter then. So when he made these textiles, there was no extra pump to his name.” 

Many Warhol textile designs were manufactured by Fuller Fabrics, a mass-market producer whose Modern Masters series of the mid-1950s included designs commissioned from Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger and other leading fine artists. The lineage would have appealed to the aspirational Warhol, say the curators. 

Warhol was multidisciplinary by necessity. He needed money for his expensive tastes, his studio assistants and to support his mother, Julia Warhola, who lived and worked with him from 1952. Julia is credited with inventing the cursive, ink-blotted lettering that characterised much of Warhol’s commercial work. “Making money is art and working is art,” wrote Warhol in his 1975 book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B & Back Again, a stream of consciousness on the contemporary world.

But as Rayner points out, Warhol’s whimsical textiles were unique in his 1950s oeuvre. Unlike, say, his shoe illustrations for I. Miller or his corporate Christmas cards for Tiffany & Co, Warhol’s fabrics were not designed to sell or promote anything; they were pure design. 

Chamberlain and Rayner started their textile investigations when they came across a December 1960 US edition of Glamour magazine in the V&A library in London, and an article about a dress collection designed by Sylvia de Gay for Robert Sloan of New York, made in a textile design called Bright Butterflies. 

“In the tiny small print was a credit to Andy Warhol,” says Rayner. The pair searched for the dress, eventually tracking an example down in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 

Proving that designs were by Warhol was a painstaking process and is an unfinished project. Some were authenticated through Stephen Bruce, a friend of Warhol’s and co-founder of Serendipity 3, a New York café-design store for which Warhol produced textile prints related to items sold, such as pretzels and ice-cream sundaes. In the book, Bruce recalls Warhol sitting around on tables in his café applying colour to his prints using bright Indian inks “in a somewhat random fashion”.

Others were authenticated by Chamberlain and Rayner’s recognition of similar illustrations in Warhol’s commercial work. The artist was not averse to a rehash: one apple-print textile design of 1956 on display in London is almost identical to the 1954 record sleeve Warhol designed for Gioacchino Rossini’s William Tell Overture. 

Tantalisingly, Chamberlain and Rayner say some fabric designs in their collection — but not in the exhibition — are likely to be by Warhol, but remain unauthenticated — for now. Although they have “overwhelming stylistic evidence, and are completely within his working style”.

All of Warhol’s work sits “on the edge of satire and reverence” for consumerism, wrote the art critic Blake Gopnik in his 2020 biography of the artist. It was the tension that shaped Warhol’s career. 

His lost textile designs are clearly early iterations of the repeat images that would define him, although they are different. They are guileless and innocent, at odds with the cynical, jaded, blank pop-art screen prints he produced in the 1960s, after switching to fine art. 

“You can safely say they informed his early fine art, for sure,” says Chamberlain. “The tumbling clown even has a spark of genius about it.”

The clown, along with Warhol’s textile butterflies, sundaes and watermelons, cannot hope to equal the mannered sophistication of the soup cans, dollar signs and Brillo soap pads that would turn him into an international fine-art superstar a decade later. But they played their part in preparing him for it. 

‘Andy Warhol: The Textiles’ is at the Fashion and Textile Museum until September 10 

‘Warhol: The Textiles’ by Geoffrey Rayner and Richard Chamberlain is published by Yale University Press