Dorothy Liebes and the “Handloomed Look”
(From a talk presented at the Met Scholars Symposium, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Spring 2019)
In the 1940s and ’50s, the weavers Dorothy Liebes, Anni Albers, Marianne Strengell, Marli Ehrmann and Ria Herlinger, among others, began using the handloom to design textile prototypes for mass production on power looms in the United States. However, their practices were often mischaracterized or reductively described as rote handiwork. This was due, in part, to the concept of the “handloomed look,” but it also derived from essentialist characterizations of weavers’ use of the handloom. At midcentury, the handloom was thought to be a device that produced a textile with raised texture and a loose weave structure. The notion that a handloom rendered a specific form and appearance not only ignored an entire history of textile production, but also served to undermine the creative agency of weavers—many of whom were women, who were for the first time becoming critical to the success and innovation in the textile industry—an industry that had been predominantly run by men. Using the case study of Dorothy Liebes, this paper attempts to resituate the weaver in American society, so as to reveal the extent of her work as a designer and the creativity and ingenuity she applied in the making of the modern textile.
In 1950 the journalist Jerome Zerbe, better known as a paparazzi photographer, wrote an article for the Sunday Mirror Magazine on Dorothy Liebes.[1] He characterized her as “the foremost exponent of the ancient art craft of weaving” whose work of “restoring the lost art of hand-weaving” took place on an “old-fashioned loom—the kind your great-grandmother used.” He also quoted Liebes, who spoke of weaving as a good hobby for women, one of the most “simple of crafts” with “therapeutic” value.[2] The focus of the article clearly indulged myths of craft as a time-honored, traditional and even pleasantly eccentric practice, commonly found in the romanticized view of a craftsman. A feminizing of weaving also worked to lend the activity an extra air of craftiness. To support the literary image of Liebes he had fabricated, Zerbe pictured her in a photograph he had taken alongside the article. The image shows Liebes sitting at a large wooden hand loom, holding a wound shuttle and looking affectionately down at a swatch she appears to be recreating on the loom. Her gingham apron, her swatch so precariously placed on the corner of her bench and her turn toward the camera suggests the stagedness of her action.
Zerbe’s article played to the popularity of weaving in the United States at midcentury.[3] However, in showing Liebes’s use of the handloom as significant for the making of customized fabrics he represented a very partial view of the hand weaver’s new status. His narrative, though, was not dissimilar from others, who had characterized Liebes’s work as noteworthy because of its association with traditions. Frederick Calkins of California Monthly, for example, anchored Liebes’s work to the past by describing her atelier assistants as creating “a native American craft,” which had been “essentially unchanged from ancient weaving.”[4] In the article “Four Outstanding American Designers,” a journalist describes Liebes as “the greatest weaver in the world today” who “revived the art of making hand-loomed fabrics in the grand manner.”[5] Liebes had indeed built up her career in the late 1920s and 30s on weaving customized fabrics on a handloom, first starting out in a studio in San Francisco and then moving to New York City in 1948. However, by 1940, ten years before Zerbe’s article, she had begun to use the handloom differently, as a tool in the design of prototypes for machine reproduction.
This photograph of Liebes, which is undated but was most likely taken sometime in the 1940s or 1950s, exemplifies the type of work Liebes performed from the 1940s onward, at a time when the American textile industry was revamping itself through the acquisition of advanced power looms and newly-invented synthetic fibers. To many textile manufacturers, Liebes, like other forward-thinking hand weavers, proved vital because of her knowledge of fibers and weave structure and her ability to experiment with designs on a small-scale using a handloom, before a final design went into full production on the power loom. Unlike in Zerbe’s photograph where Liebes sits comfortably, alone, in front of a wooden handloom in her home, here she stands over a giant industrial loom in a factory setting alongside a male colleague. In place of the shelves of soft fiber pictured in the background of Zerbe’s photograph, we see in the background of the image on the right a massive iron beam that extends out like a wrench grabbing a colossal bolt head, behind which are coils and a thicket of hardware components that constitute the dark jungle of machines that makeup a factory. Instead of holding a wound shuttle, Liebes grips a swatch as she supervises the work of the machine, evaluating its effectiveness—of what, we cannot say for certain.
Around the same time that Liebes had begun to design for textile manufacturers, advertisements and articles in trade journals and home furnishing magazines began announcing a new trend in fabrics with a “handloomed look.” Writing for Voque the actress Janet Gaynor poeticized the handloomed look as “a trend from loom to room,” which “has taken to the walls and the floors.”[6] Apart from the New York Times, which described the handloomed look as a “weaving innovation,” most all sources construed it as mimicry. An advertisement for Goodall Fabrics, for example, reads: “textures machine translated from Liebes’ handwoven originals.” Similarly, another advertisement states: “Now, the design, color and texture variations of rich high-pile hand-woven rugs have been beautifully duplicated [on machine looms] by Bigelow.”
Considering the postwar moment and a widespread hesitancy to machine design, it makes sense that marketers and journalists would have recognized the intrinsic value that hand weaving carried and seized upon it in describing a new fashion trend. However, it wasn’t just a process that was identified in the phrase the “handloomed look,” but also a specific style with an ostensibly identifiable form and appearance.
Even when the handloomed look was not manifestly defined as a process of replication, embedded in its name was the very notion of reproduction. The term “look” suggests a process of mirroring, where one form – that of the handloomed – appears just like the other – that of the power loomed. Because the power loomed textile was indeed planned on the handloom one could easily assume a relationship of imitation between the two forms—a relationship, which permitted the perception of the handloomed textile as a sort of original and the power loomed textile as its machined copy. Were this relationship of an original and a copy believable, one would have to presuppose that all textiles made on a handloom contained a basic set of formal characteristics.
Interestingly, in the 1940s and 1950s, ideas about the characteristics of a handwoven textile emerged. A prominent voice on this topic was Edgar Kaufmann Jr., the chief curator of the Department of Industrial Design at the Museum of Modern Art. In a 1954 article titled “The Handweaver’s Place in the U.S. Textile Market” Kaufmann writes “most of the changes [to household fabrics in the last five years] can be credited to the influence of handweavers.” The changes he notes concern the form and appearance of modern textiles, in particular their texture. Whereas in the early 20th century texture was flatter, slicker and smoother, Kaufmann finds that now woven textiles have a more heavily textured feel and appearance with a relief surface. Casement cloths he sees are “neither as sheer as curtains nor as tightly woven as draperies,” which is “especially lively evidence of the direct influence of hand loomed experiments on commercial producers.” [7] One infers from Kaufmann’s writing that the hand weaver bought about a litheness and flexibility to the machine-woven fabric. While this may have been true to an extent, Kaufmann does little to articulate the weavers’ processes. By celebrating the handloom, itself, equating it with the production of a textile with a specific appearance, he undermines weavers’ creative agency and their ultimate place—which he fails to articulate in the title of his article—as actual designers.
In another article, titled “A Decorator’s Use of Handwoven Fabrics,” published a year before Kaufmann’s, in the journal Handweaver & Craftsman, Walter Storey profiles the reputable interior designer Bertha Schaefer.[8] To describe her work, Storey shares an anecdote from one of her commissions, in which Schaefer is asked by a client to redesign his apartment in the style of “Louis XVI elegance.” In attempts to meet the client’s request, Schaefer decides to replace floral patterned needlework found on the headboard of the client’s bed with a handwoven textile, which she finds suitable because of its “heavily textured weave” with a loose weave structure. For the curtains, Schaefer selects more hand weaves specifically because of their “appropriate delicacy” and “thin, almost cobwebby character.”[9] (Although I don’t know Schaefers exact choices, I do know the fabrics she selected were designed by Jack Lenor Larsen.) In her decision to obtain a particular style—a look and specific performativity—Schaefer paints a clear picture of how she interprets handwoven fabrics. Similar to Kaufmann’s ideas, Schaefer understands handwoven textiles as having noticeable relief (what she describes as “heavily textured”), but also having a weave structure permitting a fabric’s ease and grace of movement, which is something she believes appears delicate. In a final piece of advice, Schaefer exclaims that “fabrics should not be too firmly woven. The characteristic ‘hand’ or grateful suppleness of handwoven textiles should be preserved, together with a durable character.”[10]
Many, perhaps hundreds of swatches Liebes designed in the 1940s and 1950s, reveal the characteristics noted by Kaufmann and Schaefer. Take for example this flashy plaid swatch Liebes wove in January 1948: the thin, almost threadlike pink and orange synthetic fibers have been woven within a grid structure so loose so as to exploit their wiry, irregular form—what Schaefer might call a cobweb-like feature. Or how about this swatch—simple in its monotone color but rich in its stark textural contrasts with a visible bas-relief when viewed on the side, which Kaufmann might liken to “heavily textured.” However, there are also these radiant colored swatches, which are quite different in being tightly woven using denser multiply fibers. In another swatch, Liebes employs mono-sized fibers in plain weave, to create an even, flat surface with a smooth, slicker appearance. Lastly, there are more experimental swatches, employing various types of slats, which were likely being considered for the making of window blinds or free-standing screens. One images these swatches as very pliable, but not necessarily lithe and slender. Although Liebes wove all of these swatches on a hand loom, perhaps even different types of hand looms, one is hard pressed to point to any one particular formal or tactile feature that they all share. Furthermore, when compared with this power loomed curtain fabric on the right (from around the same time period), it becomes impossible to distinguish the difference between two types of tool application, apart, from the odd netting structure on the back of the power loomed curtain. Both the textiles employ thick, multiply fibers. Both have warp and weft that make subtle curves; and both appear to have a soft spiny surface texture. The point is that the tools used to make these fabrics are not what dictated their form and appearance, those decisions lied directly within the purview of the weaver, as artist and designer.
This photograph from the Reporter depicting furnishing fabrics with a handloomed look continues to suggest the same idea. These fabrics, we’re told in the caption below, were designed by Liebes and manufactured on a power loom by Goodall Fabrics. On the far right, the lighter colored fabrics contain a tiny popcorn-like texture. The center fabric has detectable ribbed fluffiness. To the left, motley surface textures exploit the materiality of the fibers used, pronouncing the sculptural possibilities inherent within textiles and weaving. Apart from the presence of textured surfaces, one is at pains to locate similarities between these materials. One is further stretched when considering how they may in some way resemble any other handloomed fabrics other than the single prototype used to make them.
Throughout her practice, Liebes was aware of preconceived ideas around hand weaving, working at times to overturn them and also embrace them. In the journal Retailing, for instance, we find that Liebes has “introduced a heavy tapestry weave…much like the gros point weave of hand embroidery” in order “to give a feeling of weight and heaviness [so as] to counteract the general belief that all hand-loomed materials are sheer.”[11] However, in her unpublished autobiography, we also read of how Liebes attempted to imitate popular conceptions of hand weaving through altering the spin of fibers. Collaborating with Kamma Zethraus, a spinner skilled in making threads on a Swedish spinning wheel, Liebes developed spun fibers with, what she writes, were “new and different effects.” In describing the fiber texture as “new and different” Liebes suggests the absence of a model or original form to copy. Another spun fiber, she characterizes as having “a kind of undulating look” which evokes the idea of handiwork.[12]
Liebes also speaks of her work with power loom technicians to create the handloomed look. She describes figuring out how to alter the “cadence of power looms” so as to break “their even rhythm,” resulting in the machine weaving a finished fabric with “a slightly uneven look characteristic of hand woven fabrics” and with “a softer and less tightly-woven form.”[13] In a particularly amusing anecdote, she conveys the pains she took to achieve this form:
“From time to time, a technician would say in blunt New Englandese, ‘Cahn’t be done, Mrs. Liebes. Taint feasible.’ On one such occasion Elmer [Ward of Goodall Fabrics] blew up. ‘You let Mrs. Liebes go as crazy as she wants to,’ he said. It’s your job to make it feasible.’ The technicians no doubt did consider me a little crazy at first but we became great friends later.”[14]
In working to overturn and embrace preconceptions of hand weaving, Liebes, then, reveals the extent of her work as a skilled weaver and designer.
Returning to the two photographs of Liebes at work, one notices something quite striking about her practice. In both images, one sees her referencing a swatch, as if it were a tool guiding her performance on the loom. On one hand, the action suggests the loom’s irrelevance in the act of creativity. It argues instead for the idea that weaving, no matter what tool is being used, is a process of form creation. On the other hand, the action also conveys the crucialness of a weaver’s knowledge of specific tools and how to use them, interchangeably, together, knowing when to tweak them, adapt them and utilize them at appropriate times in tandem with specific fiber materials designed to be held by them. To achieve a desired woven form, then, might be best understood as a creative act of translation, by which a weaver brings forth a form and appearance not from the use of a single tool, but through manipulating several tools to the point where neither the hand of the weaver, nor a single tool, be it the power loom, the hand loom or a spinning machine can be distinguished. The inventiveness and imagination in such craft actions are not easily summarized in a set of bullet points defining a weaver’s skill, let alone through the superficially denotative phrase “handloomed look.” Separately these two photographs, while representing truths of Liebes’s practice, fail to convey the reality of her work as a designer. When juxtaposed, however, they offer a fascinating storyboard of the making of the modern textile.
Liebes was something of a celebrity in the design world at midcentury. Her work was sought out by notable architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and large-scale fabric manufacturers such as DuPont. By 1970, she had won 20 national and international awards and exhibited in over 100 exhibitions. In light of her stardom, many characterizations of her success were couched within a specific rhetoric. She was a star, as Calkins reminds us, because she revived an ancient craft or as Zerbe puts it, “restored a lost-art.” But when was weaving ever really lost in the United States? To presume so would be to ignore the history of women’s work. Or that of laborers in the rural south and those working in factories in the north. What such phrases achieve are the rendering of Liebes as valuable for her ability to exhume, to reproduce and to copy. The handloomed look, while announcing something novel, continued to embed these same conceits: the phrase itself, suggests not a replication of a form, but rather a specific practice. That a practice, particularly one such as hand weaving, might yield a singular appearance speaks to a gross simplification of over 2,000 years of textile history wherein handwoven fabrics of infinite variety were made. The essentialist expression of handloomed look, then, has a way of undermining the creativity and, dare I say, originality of the object which it describes. Furthermore, the phrase doesn’t serve to distinguish the inroads in industry many women weavers were making—not as copiers of others patterns but as designers in their own right.
In the work of Liebes, hand weaving was more often than not a practice in prototype designing. This meant that what was made on her handloom was very much affected by what could be made and how it could be made on the machine loom. The modern textile’s basic gridlock of warp and weft fibers in plain or twill weave variations speaks to the capabilities of machine looms at the time. However, these weave structures also allowed for immense creativity in the sculpting of a fabric with texture and color, which weavers had become keen to do with newly-invented synthetic fibers and dyes. In Liebes’s work, an exciting blending of fibers generate swatches with palpable textural emphasis and varied relief surfaces. Making them required the expertise not only of a weaver, but of spinners and machine technicians. The handloomed look of the modern textile speaks not of a visible form, then, but rather of myth, a longing for the past, a need to eschew the machine, a marketing ploy, a desire for familiarity, and something that was done, as the interior designer Bertha Schaefer says, “with charm.” But let charm not deceive, the modern textile was made with ingenuity, imagination and foresight of industrial innovation by the weaver herself, who, at midcentury in the United States had emerged as a designer in her own right.
[1] Jerome Zerbe, “The Loom in the Penthouse” Sunday Mirror Magazine (June 1, 1950) Box 11, Folder 10, Dorothy Liebes papers.
[2] Ibid.
[3] A confluence of factors gave way to newfound success in the textile industry, including advancing technology, the invention of synthetic (or plastic) fibers, the influx of emigres with expert knowledge of weaving and a general demand for U.S.-made textile products during WWII, when foreign supply chains were shortened or cut off.
[4] Spiral, Image 3262, California Monthly
[5] “Four Outstanding American Designers,” article, Image 3467
[6] Scrapbooked article titled “Fashions in Living” in Vogue, written by Janet Gaynor Adrian, dated April 15, 1959, Box BV 47, Dorothy Liebes papers.
[7] Kaufmann, Handweaver & Craftsman, fall 1954.
[8] Walter Rendell Storey, “A Decorator’s Use of Handwoven Fabrics,” Handweaver & Craftsman vol. 4. no. 4 (fall 1953), 4-8.
[9]Ibid., 7.
[10] Ibid.
[11] “New Hand Weaves” in Retailing, Home Furnishings, October 9, 1939, (Image 3250) from the spiral
[12] Autobiography Manuscript, undated, Box 10, Folders 33-34, Dorothy Liebes papers.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Autobiography Manuscript (undated), Box 10, Folder 34, page 287, Dorothy Liebes papers.