Fashions: Fabrics

The Idea: Modern life reflected in dress silks.

The Motive: To create a vogue for odd materials.

The Story: Designers last week exhibited in Manhattan (at the Art Centre show) silk dress fabric taking as motifs jazz bands, Fifth Avenue crowds, ticker tape, rollercoasters, etc. In similar designs are printed linens and other fabrics for drawing-room hangings. Graphic art is represented in the work of F. V. Carpenter. He has designed a pattern portraying Manhattan’s shopping district with its pedestrians & automobiles. Other designers have used toboggan slides and umbrellas, massed lines, moving lines of busses and cars. Artist John Held Jr. has done a jazz band—round bald heads, heads with sparse hair, their owners blowing saxophones or beating drums. Sil-houet prints contrast the curves of a roller-coaster runway with the straight lines of tall supports. The emphasis in the toboggan cars suggests a pattern of the Orient rather than Coney Island. So called “message prints” (letters of various sizes & colors printed on a lighter background) spell out such words as “It,” “Cheerio” & “Je t’aime.” Ticker tape on a black background careless of space and balance meets the requirements of graphic design. “April” in the modern sense is the view of struggling humanity from a 21-story skyscraper.