Last winter I asked Todd Oldham if he would be interested in curating an exhibition of oddities from the Paley Textile Collection. First he agreed, then added more gifts: He would even design the exhibition, as well as the invitation, poster, postcard, and T-shirt. For a new director of a start-up design museum, this was a minor miracle.
I knew a few things about Todd Oldham. In the late 80s and 1990s he was an influential fashion designer who opted to sell his label so he could explore other projects like fashion photography and hotel design. One foray into designing the furniture and interiors for The Hotel in South Beach, Florida had won lots of critical acclaim. Rumor had it that he was now designing a line of Morocco tiles and discussing a deal to create housewares for Target. A diversified designer: Just the person needed by a center that bridges all the design arts.
Oldham knew very little about The Design Center at Philadelphia University, but the project had a number of his favorite ingredients: mid-century modern architecture, quirky collections, free reign.
The fact is, The Design Center is one of the country's great secrets. The building in which we're based is a Hollywood rancher built in 1955, shaped like a "U" surrounding a grand piano-shaped swimming pool, overlooking Fairmount Park. Our galleries were once the rooms where Goldie Paley, mother of William, the founder of CBS, entertained guests and held formal soirees.
Packed into rooms that served as Goldie's bedroom, boudoir, guest suite, powder rooms and pantry are well over 200,000 artifacts related to textiles that the university collected for past 125 years. The vast (and rather eccentric) collection contains such material culture as: Hippie-era Pucci slips and Last Supper funeral fans; velvet suits befitting Little Lord Fauntleroy and centuries-old swatchbooks the size of a kitchen sink; Ecclesiastical attire and altar pieces; kitschy African export prints; scores of 19th-century miniature loomed portraits and haute couture from here to eternity. Paley's library of 19th- and 20th-century fabric swatches numbers well into the 100,000s and could entrance a designer for years.
I couldn't offer Oldham that kind of time, but I think over the past six months he's had fun. From the beginning Oldham has talked about reintroducing elements of domestic life and hominess back into this place. His exhibit, Oddities from the Paley Textile Collection, does just that.
In the entrance foyer, the notion of the show is set in motion. Open swatchbooks line the path leading to a glorious gown designed by Oldham himself. On one candy pink wall, Oldham set century-old woven pictures called Stevengraphs in swirls to mimic the sky line in Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night. "It's a visual metaphor for what it's like to go into the the back rooms here, like a visual tornado-a good tornado" Oldham quickly adds.
In Gallery One, Paley's former living room, the walls are painted a perfect shade of morning sky blue, and strung with clotheslines to which are pinned dozens upon dozens of mid-century David and Dash hand printed Pop designs. "The kinetic movement in the prints remind me of the way laundry blows in the wind," Oldham commented. Over the mantle, he created a piece of art using 17th-19th century silk brocade Persian swatches. The work is based on a painting by the late American Abstract Expressionist Adolph Gottlieb. In the center of the room a Victorian lady, dressed with two dozen or so separate garments, appears to be on a stroll through the house (or is it the garden?). What a picture of domestic life!
In Gallery Two, once the library, one wall is tacked with contemporary carpet swatches from Philadelphia-based Hugh Nelson Carpet Mills; another with 1920s-era French printed and painted textile designs; a third with the gloriously brash rigid weft weavings of the late Dorothy Liebes, a designer influenced by the Bauhaus. Laid out among these saturated hues and playful patterns is a 19th-century, elaborately embroidered Chinese dragon robe from the Qing dynasty.
In Gallery Three, once the dining room, mannequins dressed in Pucci, Pulitzer, Adrian and Norell casually pose against a backdrop of banana and khaki stripes. A bookshelf seemingly built for a giant sports 19th-century swatch books, each the size of a kitchen sink. Around the corner the pantry is filled with the raw ingredients of the show: reeled silk, black mohair, wild cotton, white cocoons. "I like how unsettling it is," Oldham says. "We usually find such comfort in our kitchens."
Beauty and the macabre. East and West. Ancient and contemporary. Brilliant and subdued. It's in the spaces between such juxtapositions that Todd Oldham likes to play. And how well he does it.