Counter Culture Meets Curtain Couture

Back in January I published a post entitled Aesthetic Dressing - The Anti-Fashion Arts & Crafts Movement. The Arts and Crafts (or Aesthetic) movement was a reaction against the damaging effects of industrialisation and the relatively low status of the decorative arts.  A group of like-minded artists and intellectuals, including William Morris, sought to reform the design and manufacture of everything from buildings to jewellery and to encourage an appreciation of art and an understanding of what was beautiful. They saw the prim and proper Victorian society as rigid and the obsession with a false respectability as foolish. Beauty for the sake of beauty was their motto.  You can read it HERE.

Hating how the textile mills of the 19th century had devalued the importance of skilled weavers and relied upon poorly paid unskilled workers toiling in dreadful conditions, William Morris was inspired to co-found the furnishing and decorative arts company, Morris & Co. Morris also objected to the use of the new chemical dyes which by the 1850s had replaced the old, organic dyes, considering these new dyes hideous and gaudy. While the older dyes faded to more subtle hues, he wrote that aniline-dyed fabrics changed into "abominable hues" and experimented tirelessly to produce subtle colours for his fabrics, only using natural dyes.

My Mum was obsessed with William Morris and my childhood home was furnished in many of his textiles so naturally I grew to love them, too. I was excited to spot these two 1960s-era Morris & Co., door curtains in Golden Lily (designed in 1889) priced at just £3.95 each in a local charity shop earlier this year. Too small for our huge Georgian-era windows, I washed and stashed them away waiting for inspiration to strike.

With its swirling tendrils, unfurling acanthus leaves and swathes of flowers, these are some of the hallmarks that make Golden Lily an archetypal Morris & Co, design although it wasn't William Morris but John Henry Dearle, who'd created Golden Lily, three years after Morris's death.

In 1878, at the age of 19, Deale started work as a shop floor assistant at Morris & Co's Oxford street showroom. Here he'd have learnt about the collective's preference for communal guilds over Victorian factories and the poor working practices they were synonymous with. He would also have learnt about the apprenticeships on offer at Morris & Co, how they were cross-disciplinary and how they covered a broad swathe of the decorative arts, addressing William Morris's vision of a "total interior" of a space, where wallpaper, architecture and fabric could come together to form something beautiful. These principles enabled Deale's artistic abilities to flourish and he quickly moved from the shop floor to the glass painters' workshop, moving on to become the firm's first apprentice tapestry weaver. 

The Golden Lily since has seen various iterations across history, most famously with its darker colourway in 1960s British counterculture, which was sold at the iconic King Road boutique, Granny Takes A Trip and bought by the likes of George Harrison.

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It even featured on a British postage stamp!

When I'd shared my curtain with the William Morris Appreciation Society on Facebook my friend Lynn, who I'd visited the Scent exhibition with a couple of weeks ago (HERE), had suggested I make something similar to the legendary Granny Takes a Trip jacket but inspired by the long Phool waistcoat Nikki wore when we'd met up in Birmingham I decided to rummage through my vintage patterns and make a maxi length waistcoat instead.. ta-dah!

The pattern was pretty straightforward but man, it took an age to get that pattern aligned properly! 

And here it is on me....the light's very dim today so it's not looking quite as marvellously vibrant as it does in reality! 

And let's just share the dress I'm wearing underneath, sourced by my friend Maxine who I know from End of the Road. It's another beauty by Kate Beaver (I've also got an orange cotton maxi which I wear very frequently HERE). Here's what The Vintage Fashion Guild say about her.  After leaving art school in 1957, Kate Beaver took inspiration from Aubrey Beardsley (an English illustrator and author) and began appliquéing dresses with Art Nouveau designs. The process was so time-consuming that she soon moved to block-printing. Kate and her artist partner, worked from their home in Dorset, running a dressmaking and screen-printing business throughout the Seventies. Her designs were always period inspired. Very much in the spirit of William Morris, don't you think? 

I'll probably be the only person in 'Spoons this afternoon to be embracing Aesthetic dressing (or wearing an old curtain!)  

Cheers!