Design notes - Zelinda Brunschwig's historical textile collection

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2002 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

In 1880 Achille Brunschwig established a tapestry-weaving business in Aubusson, France, which was successful enough to warrant opening a showroom in New York City in 1925. Achille's son Roger managed the American branch, which by that time had shifted from tapestries to marketing French silks and printed cottons. Showrooms were soon established in other cities in the United States, and when Roger Brunschwig returned to France to serve in World War II, his American wife Zelina, oversaw the business here. Today Brunschwig et Fils is headquartered in New York City and through offices in Paris maintains close ties to French mills and textile designers.

One of Zelina Brunschwig's passions was collecting, in particular antique textiles, which she found both in the marketplace and in houses whose owners had preserved articles of clothing and other fabrics that had descended in their families. Both her father-in-law and her husband were also avid collectors, and by the advent of World War II, they had amassed a large number of antique textiles, which they judiciously dispatched to New York City for safekeeping.

Today this collection numbers some ten thousand fabrics and other documents that pertain to the history of textile manufacture. Among the holdings are printed and woven fabrics, Chinese embroideries, costumes, wallpapaers, and drawings for textiles and costumes from the seventeenth century forward. The firm has also placed a sample of each fabric it has produced since 1925 in its archives.

The archives serve as a laboratory for the firm's designers, who mine the shelves in search of inspiration for the new designs they create each season. Additionally, the firm uses the archives to make accurate reproductions or adaptations of the document fabrics. This autumn the firm is offering several textile designs, four of which are illustrated here. Fantasy Island is a roller- and block-printed fabric created in France in the 1850s. Of about the same date and also reproduced from a French document is Rosarian, a block-printed linen, whose complex design in order to duplicate the way the colors overlap on the original. Dimitri is a large-scale damask based on a late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century French silk, and Cricket is based on a document produced in France in the 1880s.

Brunschwig et Fils has showrooms, open to the trade only, throughout the United States. For information and the locations of their showrooms, readers should telephone 212-838-7878 or consult the company's Web site (www.brunschwig.com).