Wearing Propaganda On Exhibition at Allentown Art Museum

Sunday, 01 October 2006 15:43

Allentown, PA — From October 8, 2006, though January 7, 2007, the Allentown Art Museum will present Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United States, 1931-1945.  The first major exhibition devoted to textiles with wartime propaganda imagery produced in Japan, Britain, and the United States during the Asia-Pacific War and World War II, Wearing Propaganda shows how simple articles of clothing contributed to national unity during wartime.

PROP•A•GAN•DA

1. A method of creating or maintaining a positive or negative attitude toward individuals, groups, nations, policies, doctrines, or beliefs by influencing public or individual opinions
   
2. The art of influencing and persuading others
   

Organized by Jacqueline M. Atkins, the Allentown Art Museum’s Kate Fowler Merle-Smith Curator of Textiles, the exhibition travels to Allentown from The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture in New York City.  The Allentown Art Museum’s superb textile collection is represented in the exhibition and accompanying book by almost two dozen British and American examples.

Approximately 125 works on view in the exhibition illustrate how civilian textile design helped promote wartime agendas and foster unity and support for the war effort among each nation’s citizens.  Featured are clothing and accessories, textile samples, preliminary designs, posters, and photographs drawn from public and private collections throughout the United States and Britain and from private collections in Japan.  Many of the objects, especially those from Japan, have never before been documented, exhibited, or photographed.

Wearing Propaganda provides a unique opportunity to consider this under-recognized but visually exciting genre, noteworthy today not only for its design value but also as a reflection of the popular culture.  These graphically arresting and dramatic textiles are a revelation in terms of design and its relation to the culture of war.  Alternately disturbing or humorous, innocuously beautiful or painfully confrontational, the designs reveal how wartime propaganda infiltrates even the most personal objects—the clothing that comes into immediate and intimate contact with our own bodies.

The exhibition throws into relief the similarities and differences in “wearable propaganda” from the three countries.  The majority of American and British examples, many covered with Home Front slogans, were made into women’s clothing and worn prominently in public as headscarves, blouses, and dresses. In Japan, the propaganda textiles, with their potent military imagery, were worn primarily by men and young boys.  Designs of propaganda textiles used in garments for women and girls in Japan were less overtly militaristic. 

The designs of some of the textiles are overtly patriotic, nationalistic, and militaristic, others less so, but all reflect support of their country’s commitment to the military goals of the time.  They range from mass-produced textiles to unique one-of-a-kind pieces, from starkly elegant designs to light-hearted cartoon-like images and blatant caricature.  Like wartime posters, these textiles were morale builders that encouraged citizens to participate fully in the “total war” effort.  Unlike the posters, however, they were market-driven, designed to appeal to civilians and produced by private industry, but with designs that reflected official ideology and rhetoric.

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