“Remember the talk before the millennium, about what fashion would look like—hard, metallic, futuristic?” curator Joanne Dolan Ingersoll asks, seated in her office, surrounded by objects from her upcoming exhibition “Evolution/Revolution: The Arts and Crafts in Contemporary Fashion and Textiles” at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art. “Instead, around ’94, ’95, I started observing a lot of designers who were being impacted by the digital revolution, but rather than dismissing it, they saw it as liberating—they were showing me things that were a merging of high technology and the hand.” In addition to influencing the way things were made, Ingersoll notes, the new tools were also liberating creators from “the horrible, anonymous fashion industry” by giving them more control—not only over the realization of their concepts, but the creative, social and environmental conditions under which work was created.

The meteoric moment, and the designers’ response to it, reminded Ingersoll of the 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement, particularly in Great Britain, where the transformations wrought by the Industrial Revolution, she says, “were compromising design by separating the artist from the process of making. But rather than turning their backs on industry,” individuals like the protean design figure William Morris “used it in a more thoughtful way.” The principal objective, of course, was to employ new technologies and production methods to expand artisans’ creative possibilities. But for Morris and his contemporaries, the benefits of industrialization had as much to do with process as result, notably by enabling them to exert more influence over production. “For example, initially Morris had his textiles produced in Leek by Thomas Wardle, but he didn’t feel like the quality was what he wanted, so he started his own printworks at Merton Abbey,” Ingersoll relates. In addition, Morris—as much social reformer as master craftsman—“believed that anyone could do anything with the right training, if there were passion and understanding. So he brought on people with no experience whatsoever, and created a sense of communal effort among everyone within his workshop.”

The similarities between then and now inspired Ingersoll to mount “Evolution/Revolution,” which showcases over 20 international designers, artists and architects, all active in fashion and textile design, who represent what, in the curator’s view, amounts to a latter-day Arts and Crafts movement: makers responding to the world-altering cataracts of the digital age by using technology to innovate creatively, take greater ownership of the production process, and incorporate ideas about sustainability, community and human rights into industry.

Ingersoll has assembled a diverse cast of characters to support her premise. In the exhibition’s “Storytelling” section, she’s featuring work by Hil Driessen, who blends an aesthetic derived from digital imagery and printing with a range of fiber-based materials, and Alyce Santoro’s Sonic Fabric, a colorfully screen-printed interweaving of cotton and recycled audiocassette tape, produced by both Designtex and a women’s craft cooperative in Nepal. Under “Collaboration,” Makiko Minagawa’s HaaT Collection for Issey Miyake—fashions that combine Minagawa’s famously innovative fabrics with handcraftsmanship from the Asha Sarabhai workshop in India—can be found alongside a cellular, honeycombed “softwall” structure by Molo Design, an architectural office committed to developing products that conserve energy and materials. Sweaters from Christien Meindertsma’s Flocks collection, each bearing a “passport” describing the sheep that supplied the wool, and garments from Rebecca Earley’s “Top 100” recycling effort—“one designer’s reaction to the excessive and damaging production of the fashion industry,” is how Earley likes to put it—appear in “Experimentation and Materials.” And “Art and Life” includes a dress made by Cat Chow from a 100-yard length of zipper, addressing the artist’s interest, notes Ingersoll, in “concepts ranging from body image and domestic ideals to consumerism.”

The exhibition’s focus on largely established makers, however, somewhat obscures the fact that, thanks to the availability and user-friendliness of today’s tech tools, the micro-industrialization of fashion and textile design has become nearly ubiquitous: In shops, ateliers and garages everywhere, fiber artisans of every sort are flourishing. But have they been able to exploit the advantages of industry without losing the qualities of craft? As several “Evolution/Revolution” participants suggest, 112 years after Morris’s death, the strategies for remaining a hands-on maker in the face of technological upheaval, explosive commercialization and expanding markets aren’t so different.

A case in point is the fashion designer Tess Giberson, who discovered when she expanded her business and became more of a mainstream player that sustaining a creative connection involved crafting the right process. As the work she’s exhibiting demonstrates—two dresses from her 2003 A Glance Can Launch a Memory collection, each hand-embroidered with a different chapter from a story written by her sister—Giberson was the model of a bespoke artisan. “I’ve always loved craft, which comes from my parents, artists who sold their work at craft shows,” she explains. “I love reading books about traditional handwork, then finding ways to do it following my more contemporary aesthetic.” Her output was small—the Glance collection, which featured 10 designs (one for each chapter), ranged in size from the unique Feather Dress to a knit top of which roughly two dozen were produced—and marketed in a few specialty stores, mostly in Japan. “I was trying to find a balance between making clothes I could sell and doing something satisfying on a creative level,” Giberson recalls. The designer had help, but mostly in the form of unpaid interns whom she compensated “by investing a lot of time teaching them.”

At a certain point, Giberson “wanted to do things on a bigger scale,” and got the chance in 2005, when the label Tse engaged her to oversee its women’s collection. Despite leaping into the mainstream, the designer was able to maintain her “handmade” sensibility. “In the New York studio, we had five knitting machines, and I had someone whose job it was to design the stitches, someone great at crocheting and hand-knitting,” she says. “And we began by experimenting with stitches, because if you don’t know how to make a garment, whatever the design, the result is flat. I pushed everyone to put as much creativity as possible into it, and we really enjoyed the process.” The experience, Giberson believes, “made me think about what I had been doing in a different way, how to be more effective and successful. In so many areas, you have the choice of being deliberate. And the result ends up being powerful—people understand what you’re trying to make, sell or say.”

Giberson is now applying the same deliberation to developing her own label and, significantly, what she sees as initially a 25-person company—offering “a small artisanal collection alongside the commercial line, so I can put my hands back in”—will have the same values as her craft-based business. “It’s important not to be wasteful—I can’t stand the overproduction of things—and to have quality of fabric and construction, because my intention is to make pieces that can still be worn 10 years from now,” she says. While some garments will be produced in China, “You have to be careful to make sure the labor isn’t abused. I was brought up a certain way,” Giberson adds, “and I have to live by those principles.”

Principles also loom large for Natalie Chanin, based in Florence, Alabama, for whom craft and community remain as interwoven as warp and weft. Appropriately, her “Evolution/Revolution” projects include a hand-embroidered organic cotton dress and a vintage quilt reflective of her desire to honor her hometown’s heritage. “This was the T-shirt capital of America, and I’ve been collecting oral histories from textile workers for seven years,” Chanin says. “We’ve taken old quilts, repaired them with scraps of fabric from our collection, and our workers have hand-embroidered these oral histories into them.”

The company is Alabama Chanin, an operation that at once provides jobs for the community and sustains its creative traditions—“It’s a fine line we walk between industrialization and craft,” Chanin says. Her methodology is simple: Once a piece has been designed and its components finished (the fabrics are produced in South Carolina and cut at the company’s headquarters), “we sell a craft package to 30 artisans in the field, with all of the raw materials they need to complete a piece. They do the work in their homes, and sell us back the finished goods.” While this system derives partly from the imperatives of labor law–“to work in your home, you have to have the potential for profit and loss,” Chanin explains, “and the fact that they purchase something creates the opportunity for loss”—it also enables the artisans to sew on their own schedule and, not least, imbues every garment with its maker’s personality. (Not surprisingly, all this homespun craftwork comes at couture prices. “We have evening dresses that take sixteen women three weeks to make—that’s extremely expensive,” Chanin admits. To democratize her products, she recently published Alabama Stitch Book, featuring patterns and instructions for some of the company’s most popular designs—“so if you can’t afford a $500 T-shirt, you can make one yourself”—and plans to sell kits online.

While Chanin rarely sews anymore, she has designed a process that facilitates and honors craftwork—one that William Morris himself would have appreciated. When asked if she and her contemporaries have inherited the Arts and Crafts tradition, Chanin, like Giberson, braids design with values. “I believe there’s a resurgence, but it’s part of people wanting to get back to a simple, sustainable life. There’s a whole movement now that’s about slow, and happiness, and about hand,” referring to what’s become known as “slow design.” “We make heirloom pieces—when you’ve finished with your dress, you pass it down. And we use organic cotton that won’t destroy the earth. Hopefully, three or four generations down the line, someone just plants it in the ground.”

This idea isn’t incompatible with industry—in fact in Chanin’s view technology facilitates craft. “It would have been very hard, 30 years ago, to be a designer in Florence, Alabama, without the Internet,” she observes. Indeed, if, as Ingersoll points out, “Knitting is a technology,” it’s worth remembering that the advance of the arts has always benefited from industrial innovation. So
it was for the master dyer Joan Morris and printmaker Michèle Ratté, whose collaborative exhibition object—a dimensional fabric featuring a shibori ground overlaid with a design formed from 23-carat gold—owes its existence to the solution of an age-old industrial problem: that of permanently attaching layers of precious metal to a washable fabric, a brain-twister the pair wrestled with for eight years before coming up with what Morris calls “the secret sauce.” And while she and Ratté have patented their process and plan to license it for commercial use, their research was driven by personal artistic imperatives. “Applying gold to fabric was a necessity for us because of what we were trying to do in our work,” Morris explains. “The tech part had to come first, but there’s always technical mastery that has to come to do good work.”

Nevertheless, industrialization that doesn’t sacrifice craft predictably depends upon certain conditions. “The individual behind the design can’t become anonymous,” Ingersoll believes. “That’s what they were fighting for in the 19th century, when industry was taking over everything—recognition.” This is more likely when labels remain small enough for designers to control production. “We have a niche market,” Chanin admits. “We’ll never compete with the big names unless we start sewing by machine.” Even so, Giberson says, the artisanal model can work at big companies “as long as the people at the top believe in it and are willing to support it.” This, according to Ingersoll, actually has its roots in the Victorian era. “There were companies in Britain, such as Liberty, that took risks with avant-garde designers like Arthur Mackmurdo, allowing them to make a living by producing, even in a limited way, their crazy designs. And these are the textiles that made history.”

All of which suggests that the distinction between craft and industry has less to do with the tools of making than with the sensibility that controls them. Or, as Natalie Chanin puts it, “Craft is a state of mind.”