Modern Fashion's Secret Weapon: Dorothy Liebes's Textiles For Fashion
Channel: Cooper Hewitt
Date: 2023-11-08

Join modern textile and fashion historian Leigh Wishner for this illustrated talk on the extensive and extraordinary contributions Dorothy Liebes made to midcentury fashion design. Wishner will provide an overview of Liebes’s work and pervasive influence on fashion, how her research on Liebes contributes to the history of American fashion design, and explore some ways in which Liebes’s influence is still felt in the fashion industry today. 

Though her work for fashion is largely unknown, Liebes created hand woven and powerloomed textiles for fashion designers and sportswear manufacturers from the 1930s through the 1960s. Designers who used her fabrics included her close friend Bonnie Cashin, Hollywood designer Adrian, Pauline Trigère, and Clare Potter. Liebes was known for her personal style, and her own looks reflected what many American women wanted to wear: modern, high quality, and practical clothes that privileged function and elegance over fashion trends.  With her broad knowledge of materials, manufacturing, and marketing, Liebes understood the textures and colors that designers wanted for their customers. Liebes’s textiles were also put to use by Hollywood costume designers, including Edith Head and Travis Banton, who created dramatic garments made from handwoven Liebes fabrics for the movies.  

Alexa Griffith, Manager of Content and Interpretation at Cooper Hewitt, and is co-curator of A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes with Susan Brown, Acting Head of Textiles at Cooper Hewitt.