Designers in the Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fancy Textile Industry: Education, Employment and Exhibition

Abstract

According to report in the 1930s, the textile industry was a bigger consumer of design input than any other manufacturing sector, with the largest number of designs originating in studios attached to individual works (42%), followed by a similar percentage from overseas commercial studios, and only a relatively small proportion generated by either English commercial studios (13%) or freelance designers (3%). Pevsner, at much the same time, identified variations in practice according to the type of textile produced, with designs for woven fabrics mostly generated in-house and designs for prints, which was the bigger area of production, more likely to be purchased from elsewhere. 1 Certain developments distinct to the early twentieth century differentiated the experience of textile design in the 1930s from what had prevailed in the century before, in particular the growing importance of named designers in textile marketing, which gave better career prospects to in-house employees. 2 But these contemporary observations on inter-war design offer useful insights that help us to understand the complexities of the earlier industry. Examining the character of design employment, education and exhibition in Glasgow and Dunfermline, which were major centres of printed cotton and woven linen production, provides an insight into a complex provincial engagement with the processes of textile design at the height of the industry’s commercial success, and adds a Scottish perspective to a subject that has hitherto been examined mainly with reference to Manchester. 3 Almost no direct information survives in business records for the names of the designers who worked in the Scottish printed cotton industry. Where information does exist