Fabric of Democracy: Printed Textiles and Propaganda During the Cold War

This project will examine textiles as propaganda between 1946 and 1970. Textiles have overwhelmingly been written about with a focus on the domestic sphere, while propaganda has been examined as a matter of shaping the public sphere. Propaganda art has predominantly been considered in the context of totalitarian states. However, several Western propaganda textiles trouble these compartmentalisations. Three case studies of Cold War era British and American printed textiles will form the basis for this curatorial research project, which will result in a written thesis and two curatorial outputs, at the Fashion & Textile Museum (London) and British Textile Biennial (Lancashire). These designs will be placed within the wider context of propaganda as a contested term in visual and material culture, and will examine how curating propaganda objects involves a critical engagement with the intersecting space they occupy between multiple disciplines and dynamics.

An interdisciplinary approach will situate the textile archives as the basis of a written thesis and two curatorial outputs. The thesis will attempt to nuance debates by approaching the divisive term 'propaganda' with a careful understanding of the mediated formation of Cold War publics, and their concomitant civic identities, using recent methods which understand publics and identities as unstable and complex, constituted and instituted through the intersection of publics and counter publics (Warner 2002).