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home > collections > textile + fashion arts
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 |  | | From homespun to couture, enjoy works of fabric and fiber
The MFA's textiles collection was started when Boston was the center of the US textile industry. Today the Museum owns more than 27,000 objects ranging from American needlepoint to European tapestries, Middle Eastern rugs, African kente cloths, and haute couture fashions. |
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Highlights
View these interactive tours of objects from the Museum's outstanding collection of Textile and Fashion Arts.
"Walk This Way" exhibition
Textile and Fashion Arts Highlights
Jewelry Highlights
The Ellen Stone Collection of American Textiles
Ellen Stone (1854-1944) of Lexington, MA, gave over 700 textiles to the MFA at the end of the nineteenth century. This large gift came from her family homestead in Lexington, where her mother’s family—the Robbinses—had lived for generations. Most of this collection dates from the 1780s to the 1830s, when the Robbins family prospered.
Fashion Illustration from the 1940s-80s
Learn about thirteen different fashion illustrators working in the mid to later part of the 20th century and see nearly 300 diverse examples of their work. Many of the drawings are a promised gift of Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf, some have been given by the artists (including Richard Ely), and all are part of a growing group of fashion-related material in the Museum’s collection.
Asian Textiles
Thanks to generous grants from an Anonymous Donor and the Coby Foundation, Ltd., the Museum has completed a comprehensive project documenting its important collection of nearly 5,000 textiles and costumes from Japan, China, India, Southeast Asia, and Korea. Explore a group of particularly sumptuous and sophisticated robes in the tour "A Taste For Splendor." |
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Visiting the Collection and Library
The department is open to serious researchers by appointment. For more information, contact William DeGregorio (wdegregorio@mfa.org). The departmental library is an international study resource, which includes rich holdings ranging from rare books of the sixteenth to early twentieth centuries to contemporary fashion magazines. It is also open through advance appointment. |
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Friends Groups
Join the Fashion Council and the Textile and Costume Society to support and learn more about the David and Roberta Logie Department of Textile and Fashion Arts at the MFA. |
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The David and Roberta Logie Department
of Textile and Fashion Arts - History and Overview
The department currently houses more than 27,000 objects, including samplers, fans, tapestries, Japanese textiles, and ancient Peruvian textiles and costumes.
When the Museum was incorporated in 1870, Boston was the center of the United States textile industry, and the Museum's founders thought it essential to form a textile collection to provide access to examples of good design. A prime mover was Denman Waldo Ross, Harvard professor of design and a Museum Trustee who in 1890 began to build the collection with his gifts of Coptic and Andean textiles; European, Turkish, Indian, and Persian silk weavings; Indonesian batiks; and Middle Eastern rugs. Between 1889 and 1915 the Museum also acquired many superb examples of Japanese textiles and robes, mainly donated by William Sturgis Bigelow, a noted connoisseur of Japanese art. In 1930, the Museum became the first general art museum to establish a department devoted solely to textile-related artifacts.
Gertrude Townsend, the department's first curator, strengthened weaker areas in 1938 by adding the Mrs. Philip Lehman Collection of textiles and costume accessories, which included examples of sixteenth through eighteenth-century European embroideries and knitting. With the Elizabeth Day McCormick Collection, acquired in 1943–53, the Museum received its most important and extensive collection of costumes, accessories, needlework, costume books, and prints. Other gifts and purchases expanded the holdings of high fashion, regional dress, and ecclesiastical garments. The Esther Oldham Collection, one of the world's greatest collections of fans, was donated to the Museum in 1976. Twentieth-century and African textiles have been a focus of recent acquisitions.
In 2004, the department was named the David and Roberta Logie Department of Textile and Fashion Arts, in honor of a major bequest from Roberta Gleiter Logie, one of the department's most loyal and ardent supporters.
The first curator of jewelry in an American art museum was appointed at the MFA in 2006, thanks to a generous endowment by Susan Kaplan in honor of her mother. While based in the Textile and Fashion Arts Department, the Rita J. Kaplan and Susan B. Kaplan Curator of Jewelry oversees objects of adornment Museum-wide.
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