An Exhibition Celebrating Dorothy Liebes’s Distinct Weavings
As published in The New York TImes T List newsletter, JULY 2023
A weekly roundup of what T Magazine editors are noticing and coveting right now, and guides to the world's best hotels and destinations.
Left: a sample card showing a circa 1945 Dorothy Liebes textile design. Right: Liebes, standing, in her studio with associates working at their looms circa 1957.
Credit - Left: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 1972-75-114. Photo: Matt Flynn, © Smithsonian Institution. Right: Dorothy Liebes Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
In the middle decades of the 20th century, trained eyes were alert to something called the Liebes Look. Colorful, textured and shot through with shimmering, synthetic fibers like Lurex, the woven textiles of Dorothy Liebes were a signature feature of some of the most glamorous postwar interiors in America: Doris Duke’s Shangri La, the Delegates Dining Room at the United Nations, the cabin of the American Airlines flagship 747, the set of the 1949 Barbara Stanwyck film noir “Eastside, Westside” and the inside of the 1957 Chrysler Plymouth Fury, to name just a few. Opening July 7 at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, an exhibition called “A Dark, a Light, a Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes,” celebrates her work and role as a tastemaker. Celebrity weaver may seem like the fulfillment of an impossible Instagram dream but, in her lifetime, Liebes was exactly that. She was a high-profile consultant to DuPont’s Textile Fibers Department, collaborated with the likes of the industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and was declared “the greatest weaver alive today” in the pages of House Beautiful. A publicity photograph of Liebes in her studio shows her overseeing a team of artisans working at their looms against a backdrop of an enviable yarn wall. Her biography has all the elements of a 20th-century design legend, but she isn’t a household name yet. This exhibition, and its handsome accompanying monograph, now available from Yale University Press and the Cooper Hewitt, will surely change that. “A Dark, a Light, a Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” will be on view through Feb. 4, 2024, cooperhewitt.org.