Factory offcuts

Andy Warhol started out as an illustrator for greetings cards and shoe ads, but also created prints for dresses and skirts. Now, his textile works are being put on display

In June 2019, a shabby but otherwise unremarkable parcel arrived at the London home of Geoffrey Rayner and Richard Chamberlain. The collectors of 20th-century design had waited months for the package – so long, in fact, that they had almost given up hope of ever receiving the silk dress inside.

The pair’s mission to locate the garment had begun almost a decade before, in the depths of the V&A Museum’s library, where a 60-year-old copy of Glamour magazine alerted them to the design’s existence.

In the small print of a four-page article, an image of a dress in the same, distinctive print was credited simply: “Bright Butterflies, designed by Andy Warhol”.

It was only after eight years of online searching, on the website of an obscure vintage store in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that Chamberlain finally laid eyes on the pattern again. “We bought the dress,” he says; its designer wasn’t identified so it was, he pauses before concluding delicately, “keenly priced”.

While it seems impossible that a painting by Andy Warhol would ever be delivered by post – or transported anywhere without considerable fanfare – the influential pop artist’s textile designs have not commanded the same level of reverence. The artist sold many of his illustrations to textile manufacturers anonymously

– a practice that, as Rayner and Chamberlain discovered, now makes them both hard to find and comparatively inexpensive to buy,

but which once formed a key part of a successful commercial career.

Beginning with his arrival in New York in 1949, and ending only in 1964 – two years after he painted what is perhaps his most famous work, Marilyn Diptych – Warhol was a popular illustrator of magazines, books, records and textiles. A shrewd businessman, he saw each of these pursuits as a valuable income stream and, Chamberlain says, it was through this work that the artist developed his now-synonymous style.

“This period of his work has been reappraised for many years now, and is seen as an important part of what makes up the whole Warhol picture,” the collector explains. “It is important to see his progression with textile design as something that directly helped inform his early pop art, both in subject matter and approach.”

Rayner and Chamberlain have now curated a new exhibition. “We set up a criterion: his idiosyncratic style, his colouring, his humour,” Chamberlain says of the pair’s early research. The collectors used this formula to track down long-forgotten textiles bearing Warhol’s distinctive faux-naif style illustrations, before setting about authenticating the designs.

“Above all, the textiles clearly illustrate what a highly individual and talented textile designer Warhol was,” Chamberlain says. “Without us, they probably would have ended up cut up and used for cushions.”

Andy Warhol: The Textiles is at the Fashion and Textile Museum, London, Friday to 10 September.

After eight years of searching, they spotted the pattern on the website of an obscure vintage store in New Mexico