Textiles today - A global survey of trends and traditions - Beau Livre

Textiles design lies at the heart of creativity today. Designers all over the world, with their multifarious achievements, provide the stage for one of the most and least localized of the arts : textiles owe their development to religion, commerce, exchange and travel, and their vibrant and creative preservation to tenacious regionalism. In the recent past artists and designers from different ethnic backgrounds - India, Mali, Madagascar, Morocco, Burkina Faso, Nigeria - have reinvigorated art and fashion by using the fabrics and graphic elements they find on the streets of Paris, London and other cities to project an alternative, synoptic vision of textile culture on the international stage.
This survey of contemporary textiles from around the world today reveals a field that is very diverse, making it both exciting and provocative because it involves bringing together a range of otherwise fragmented images and perspectives. Extraordinary technological developments, from colour-changing, light-sensitive camouflage to emergency shelters of cement-impregnated fabric bonded to an inflatable plastic, are included alongside the simply beautiful, such as Eley Kishimoto's patterns pointing to the history of the exchange of ideas between the East and the West, or the astonishing colours of Morphotex, a fibre of multi-layer optical interference producing changes in colour from blue to purple, red and green.
This dazzlingly fresh sourcebook of original, inspiring, often colourful, designs will appeal to designers and people with an interest in textiles throughout the world.