Textiles owe their development to religion, commerce, exchange and travel, and their vibrant and creative preservation to tenacious regionalism. Artists and designers from India, Mali, Madagascar, Morocco, Burkina Faso and Nigeria have reinvigorated art and fashion by using the fabrics and graphic elements they find on the streets of London, Paris and New York and other cities. Extraordinary technological developments, from colour-changing, light-sensitive camouflage to emergency shelters of cement-impregnated fabric bonded to an inflatable plastic, are included here alongside the simply beautiful, such as Eley Kishimoto’s patterns that point to the historical exchange of ideas between the East and the West, or the astonishing colour transmutations of Morphotex.
