Bloomsbury Visual Arts
This week Selvedge’s blog has been curated by two of us from Bloomsbury Visual Arts, the leading academic publisher in the fields of fashion and design, with a fast-growing presence in art history and visual culture and architecture, as well as textiles. We are Editorial Director Frances Arnold and Publisher Georgia Kennedy. Frances works mostly on the more scholarly titles, while Georgia focuses on the more practice-oriented texts.
As part of this week’s blog, we’re both very excited to share the breadth and depth of contemporary textiles publishing with you, covering everything from original research on the historical and cultural dimensions of textiles to accessible books for students and practitioners exploring textile design, production, art, curation and conservation. Over the next few days we’ll be posting insights from some of our wonderful authors, including works of scholarship like Byzantine Silk on the Silk Roads edited by Sarah E. Braddock Clarke and Ryoko Yamanaka Kondo and Islamicate Textiles by Faegheh Shirazi.
Other highlights this week come from Jessica Hemmings and her recommended readings on touch and textiles, based on the new edition of her groundbreaking The Textile Reader. The reader sets excerpts from novels, short stories and poetry alongside more conventional academic writing to explore how textiles is written about as much what is written about textiles.
We also have first-hand advice from designer and educator Kate Farley, who walks us through the development of one of her Plot to Plate textile designs as part of her guide to Repeat Printed Pattern for Interiors. Staying with the practicalities of textile production, Leslie Davis Burns discusses the value of place in sustainable supply chains by highlighting a renewed appreciation for authenticity and connection to where and how textile products are created as part of Stories of Fashion, Textiles, and Place, co-authored with Jeanne Carver.
Finally we wrap up with Lesley Millar and Alice Kettle, authors of The Erotic Cloth, who write about cloth as the mediating surface between the body and the world beyond the body, and the charged relationship between the surface of our skin and the touch of cloth – smoothness of silk, the seductiveness of velvet – and sensuality, eroticism and desire.
We really appreciate this opportunity to share our list with you and hope you enjoy this week’s articles. If you’d like to discuss your own publishing proposal then our contact details can be found here and we’d love to hear from you!
In celebration of our guest edit, we’re also running a promotion where readers can receive 25% off Bloomsbury’s Textiles books. To get the discount use the below discount codes (location dependent) at the checkout which are valid until the end of April 2023. You can browse our full list of titles here.
UK: SELVEDGE25
USA: SELVEDGE25US
CAN: SELVEDGE25CA
AUS: SELVEDGE25AU
With best wishes,
Frances and Georgia
Bloomsbury Visual Arts