At the Kravet archive in Woodbury, Long Island, tens of thousands of textile samples from around the world are assiduously catalogued and preserved, serving both as a comprehensive record of sewn, woven, embroidered, and printed design history, and as inspiration for contemporary makers.
Scott Kravet is nicknamed the “Indiana Jones of textiles.” He is an enthusiastic archivist and the chief creative officer of Kravet, a family-owned New York business that produces high-end home furnishings, including fabrics, wallcoverings, furniture, carpets, trimmings, and lighting. A charming man, he is constantly crisscrossing the globe, making acquisitions for the collection of sixty-five thousand textiles in the Kravet company archive in Woodbury, Long Island. He is one of seven Kravets who currently work at the family firm, now more than one hundred years old. (“Kravets” is the Ukrainian occupational surname for a tailor; Scott’s Russian great-grandfather Samuel Kravet arrived in New York in 1902 with a wife, two sons, the clothes on his back, and a sewing machine.)
Scouring the world for decades, Scott has been to Laos, Cambodia, Tanzania, Polynesia, Japan, and throughout Europe. He not only buys historic pieces—ceremonial cloths from Tonga, indigenous bark cloth from Fiji, Italian paisleys, woven suzanis from Central Asia, vintage Chinese silk-embroidered robes, and pop florals from the 1960s—but also the entire archives of other textile companies. In 1995 it was Lee Jofa, a high-end fabric firm founded in New York in 1823; in 2001, GP and J Baker, a British firm founded in 1884 in Dorset, and whose extensive archives remain in England under Kravet ownership; in 2011, in a bankruptcy auction, Kravet acquired the venerated late nineteenth-century French fabric company Brunschwig et Fils, with its thirty thousand textile documents from France, England, and India; and in 2020 Kravet bought Donghia, also out of bankruptcy, and retains its archive.
Scott is constantly on the prowl: he studies auction catalogues, websites like 1stDibs, Etsy, and eBay, and visits flea markets. “We have pickers in remote parts of the world who are always on the lookout for us,” he says. “One of them, Andrey, is a Hungarian who speaks twelve languages and travels between Budapest and Istanbul. When he calls, I go.” Lina Deeb Forrester, an Egyptian American who is Kravet’s full-time archivist in Woodbury, adds, “Scott has such a good reputation in the industry that when a mill is closing, the owners call him.” “We are always discovering something new,” she says.
In scope, the Kravet archive is not as large as the Design Library in Wappingers Falls, New York, which has seven million designs under one roof in a renovated mill in the Hudson valley (as well as a satellite in London). Its showroom has antique and contemporary European, American, tribal, and ethnic designs as well. But, unlike the private Kravet archive, the Design Library is commercial; it was formed for the sale and licensing of textile designs for creatives in the worlds of fashion, home furnishings, textiles, wall coverings, and graphic arts.
The Kravet archive, by contrast, is a working reference library for the company’s in-house designers. Kravet’s Manhattan design studio uses it to reinterpret old pieces for new collections. It’s a lengthy process. “It takes at least six to ten months from concept to execution for a new pattern,” Scott Kravet explains.
The ever-popular Chinese Leopard toile is a good example of the pains the company takes to get its designs just right. In 1959 Brunschwig et Fils produced the original leopard-spot block-printed cotton toile, which featured vignettes of Chinese figures engaged in everyday pursuits enclosed in trellises of flowers. It was based on an 1825 French textile in the Musée de la Toile de Jouy, France. The pattern was relaunched in 1992, and has had its colors updated several times. For me, the original 1959 iteration still seems especially fresh and contemporary. The Chinese figures are in yellow and gold, shown in silhouette against grisaille foliage. The flower trellises are bright yellow, the leopard spots taupe. The most recent coloration is azure and pale blue, with beige flowers, reflecting the current popularity of pastels. “It is one of the brand’s most sought-after patterns to this day,” Forrester says.
Visiting the Kravet archive is like opening presents on Christmas. Inside each cabinet and drawer are piles of treasures. On a recent tour, my favorite find was a Tree of Life pattern that is based on a luxurious, colorful eighteenth-century Indian palampore the size of an Aubusson tapestry. In large scale, it features a flourishing tree adorned with tropical flowers and exotic birds. It was created in the 1920s by the British textile designer Harry Wearne for Lee Jofa. “It took him two years to do all the drawings; we have his original rough sketches,” Forrester says. “The fabric is hand-block printed using 365 individually hand-carved wood blocks, each aligned like a 3-D jigsaw puzzle. The process required highly skilled artisans with years of training. They could produce only two yards per day. Wearne said he wanted to do the best thing of its kind that had ever been attempted.”
Another classic pattern is Nympheus (the scientific term for water lily). For this, in 1915, a British studio painter by the name of William Turner (no relation to J. M. W. Turner) reinterpreted a Ming dynasty silk scroll in the British Museum. He combined water lilies, lotus leaves, kingfishers, and egrets in an intricate, luscious pattern. The print has been recolored over the years but has never gone out of production.
On the more exotic side, the archive has vintage embroidered linen suzanis from central Asia that were created specifically for women’s dowries; the patterns on these blanket-size pieces symbolize protection, fertility, and prosperity, talismans for the bride’s future. Historically, young women embroidered them, alongside their mothers, with vibrant floral elements, suns, moons, vines, and medallions. Each one required months of hand-stitching. The color palette embraced navy, teal, raspberry, hot pink, and turquoise. One piece in the archive is an original Dzhambul cotton and linen print from nineteenth-century Bukhara, India, inspired by a suzani. It was made with seventeen screens to emulate the chain-stitch silk embroidery on the original.
More familiar to the general public may be the so-called “indiennes”—the brightly colored prints made in Europe and India inspired by much cheaper examples imported from India’s Coromandel Coast beginning in the 1600s. The Indian-made cotton prints were so popular that in 1686 Louis XIV banned their importation, manufacture, and use, to protect the French textile industry in wool and silk (an act that failed to stamp out the prints’ popularity). The archive boasts an outstanding hand-painted cotton Indian panel from c. 1710–1730 with stylized flowers and leaves that has been rejiggered into a popular contemporary print called Tamerlane.
There are too many other treasures to list: eighteenth-century French toiles, contemporary horsehair cloth woven exclusively by a mill for Hermes, Russian cotton ikats, Italian silk bargellos, Mbuti contemporary cotton prints from the Congo, Coptic embroideries, silk velvets, and brocades. Occasionally, Kravet opens its vast archive to scholars, design students and guests for guided tours. Grab the chance if you are able—but be sure to take a sweater. The vast archive is set at a constant 65 degrees, so it’s always chilly, keeping you wide awake for all the serendipitous
discoveries to be had.
WENDY MOONAN is a New York writer who specializes in architecture, antiques, and design. She is the author of the Rizzoli bestseller New York Splendor: The City’s Most Memorable Rooms.
