BY Rebeca Schiller | February 24, 2011

The age-old art of recycling textiles

The green or upcycled trend isn’t a twenty-first century and politically correct development. In fact, throughout time and across cultures people have reconfigured threadbare or worn fabric because of their value and they were reused often for practical, aesthetic and even symbolic purposes. This month and until January 2012, The Textile Museum in Washington, DC explores and presents diverse examples of repurposed textiles in Second Lives: The Age-Old Art of Recycling Textiles.

Featured in the exhibit are eighteen different pieces from The Textile Museum’s permanent collection that date from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. Each item presents how different cultures have turned these threadbare textiles and have turned them into wall hangings, a quilt, or even turned into other garments for practical or religious purposes. Textiles on display include patchwork hangings from Uzbekistan, India and Iran. Textiles woven with recycled fiber from Japan and from the American Southwest, and clothing made from discarded religious textiles from the Pacific Northwest and Turkey.

Many of the displayed textiles have a religious connotation, either in their original forms or in their second lives. A sutra cover from the sixteenth and seventeenth century is pieced together from an insignia badge worn by a Chinese military officer during the Ming dynasty. In Asia, families often donated fine clothing of deceased relatives to Buddhist temples in order to seek favor for their passed loved ones. These garments were turned into new forms for religious purposes. Textiles formerly used to cover holy sites in the Middle East and other Islamic countries were distributed to pilgrims. The fabrics, in some cases, were used to create garments wearers that were like a talisman, an example of this is a red silk vest embellished with verses from the Koran.

On exhibit from the Museum’s extensive kantha collection is a pair of nineteenth century Indian tapestries that had multiple purposes—wall hangings, prayer rugs, or floor coverings for visitors.

Garments that represented wealth and social status, but could no longer be worn were reused in other manners. A panel from a dragon robe of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) that typically took three years of labor to make in its first incarnation was later refashioned as a decorative wall hanging.

Other textiles have a varied history that has been passed down from the ages as seen as by two woven velvet panels from sixteenth century Persia. These found their way to Turkey and were used by Sultan Suleyman as ornaments in his tent. The panels later made their way to Poland in the seventeenth century and were incorporated into a sled blanket used by an aristocratic family until the 1920s.

Second Lives: The Age-Old Art of Recycling Textiles was curated by Lee Talbot, associate curator of the Eastern Hemisphere Collections. The exhibit will run until January 8, 2012. For more information, please call The Textile Museum at 202-667-0441 or visit www.textilemuseum.org.