Renowned for her fabrics woven from unconventional materials in glimmering, color-saturated palettes, weaver Dorothy Liebes loomed large in 20th-century design. Her inventive fabrics could be found just about everywhere: covering the seats of airplanes and cars, aboard ocean liners, in theaters and hotels, stretched across radio speaker grills. Her bespoke, hand-loomed window treatments and wall coverings adorned high-profile spots like the United Nations headquarters, the Plaza Hotel (featuring curtains with tiny electric light bulbs!), and buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright. Fashion designers deployed her fabrics in their haute couture, and in Hollywood her textiles appeared in costumes and light-refracting set pieces. Popular, mass-market furnishings with her signature “Liebes look” — including upholstery, area rugs, curtains, and wallpaper — became staples of stylish American homes.
Yet, despite this far-reaching impact, Dorothy Liebes is no longer a household name. “How can it be that such a famous and influential figure is virtually absent from history books?” writes Alexa Griffith Winton, manager of Content and Interpretation at Cooper Hewitt, in the introduction to the new monograph A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes (Cooper Hewitt in association with Yale University Press, 2023). The 253-page book, along with a retrospective at Cooper Hewitt and a comprehensive online exhibition, seeks to correct this omission from cultural memory and introduce Liebes’s vivid, textural world to a new generation.
The book and the museum and online show draw extensively from the Smithsonian archives’ Dorothy Liebes Papers to give an overview of her expansive career. Sections explore the weaver’s contributions to modern interior design, film, and fashion, as well as hand weaving and the textile industry. More than 175 pieces — including a trove of woven samples, apparel, furniture, photos, and videos — spotlight the trailblazer’s distinctive chromatic and material sensibilities, and her abundant, and overlapping, occupations. Known as a leading designer-weaver, Liebes was also a colorist, stylist, trendsetter, industry spokesperson, educator, mentor, and global craft ambassador, adept at interpreting and responding to trends and innovations that emerged throughout the heart of the 20th century.
From opening her first studio in San Francisco in 1930, during the Great Depression, until her death in 1972 in New York City, Liebes’s career intersected with a rich swathe of American history. Nationwide restrictions on using certain fibers and dyes, which came with World War II, led her to experiment with unorthodox materials. The postwar years brought a boom in the invention of new polyester and nylon fibers, like Orlon, Dacron, and Antron, marketed for their durability, washability, and wrinkle-resistance. Liebes promoted these materials, appearing in commercials and incorporating them into her own designs. She also worked as a consultant, advising more than a dozen manufacturers, including DuPont, Sears, and Doebeckmun Company, makers of Lurex, a metallic yarn she helped popularize.
Under the gallery lights, Liebes’s textiles twinkle and glitter. Some pieces glow neon bright or radiate jewel tones. Others soothe the eye with muted pastels. Though the accompanying book can’t offer the same sensory experience of the real deal, it gets close. Enclosed in a dark green, cloth-covered case binding with an electric lime-colored serif font and aqua-teal end papers (a nod to Liebes’s penchant for analogous colors), a generous selection of lush, full-page close-ups display her weavings in tremendous detail. The photos exude such fibrous presence that it seems like you could actually feel the velvety chenilles, fluffy tufts, loopy fringes, crinkly plain weaves, smooth bamboo slats, translucent acrylic rods, and slubby twills.
With thorough and caring scholarship and curation, A Dark, A Light, A Bright feels like a love letter to the path-forging designer. Suffused with her voice, through audio recordings, videos, and pull quotes, the presentation comes across like a message from Liebes herself, calling out from across time with a galvanizing reminder to think creatively, to be bold. And, as the chromatic maven herself implores, “Don’t be afraid of color.”
A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes continues at Cooper Hewitt (2 East 91st Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through February 4, 2024. The exhibition was organized by Susan Brown and Alexa Griffith Winton.
