Behind the Scenes at the Silver Studio: Rex Silver and the Hidden Mechanisms of Interwar Textile Design

Abstract

The Silver Studio produced designs for mass-market wallpapers and textiles between 1880 and c.1960. This paper draws on evidence from the Silver Studio Collection (now at the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University, London), to propose that Silver Studio designs in the interwar period were never the work of one individual but rather were the product of complex negotiations between clients and designers, mediated by Rex Silver. The Studio’s diaries and other records provide an insight into these negotiations and raise questions about the nature of “authorship” in design.

Keywords:

• Silver Studio
• textile design
• authorship
• attribution
• historicism

Notes

1 Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (London: Faber, 1936).

2 Denise Whitehouse, “The State of Design History as a Discipline,” in Design Studies: A Reader, ed. Hazel Clark and David Brody (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 58.

3 Cheryl Buckley, “Made in Patriarchy: Toward a Feminist Analysis of Women and Design,” Design Issues 3, no. 2 (1986): 3–14; Jill Seddon, “Mentioned, but Denied Significance: Women Designers and the ‘Professionalisation’ of Design in Britain c 1920–1951,” Gender & History 12, no. 2 (2000): 426–447.

4 Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

5 Jilly Traganou, “Architectural and Spatial Design Studies: Inscribing Architecture in Design Studies,” Journal of Design History 22, no. 2 (2009): 174.

6 Ibid.

7 Lou Taylor, “De-Coding the Hierarchy of Fashion Textiles,” in Disentangling Textiles: Techniques for the Study of Designed Objects, ed. Mary Schoeser and Christine Boydell (London: Middlesex University Press, 2002), 67–80.

8 Judy Attfield, “Taking a Look at the Wild Side of DIY Home Decor,” in Buying for the Home: Shopping for the Domestic from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, ed. David Hussey and Margaret Ponsonby (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 199.

9 Keren Protheroe, “Bloom and Blotch: Floral Print and Modernity in the Textile Designs of Winifred Mold and Minnie McLeish 1910–1930” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Kingston University, 2012); Hazel Clark, “The Anonymous Designer,” in Design and Industry: The Effect of Industrialisation and Technical Change on Design, ed. Nicola Hamilton (London: Design Council, 1980), 33–38.

10 Protheroe, “Bloom and Blotch.”

11 Christine Boydell, “Free-Lance Textile Design in the 1930s: An Improving Prospect?,” Journal of Design History 8, no. 1 (1995): 27–42, at 29.

12 H. G. Hayes-Marshall, British Textile Designers Today: With Introduction and Chapters on the Designer and Design, Notes on Colour, Definitions and Descriptions, Methods of Manufacture, Yarns (Leigh-on-Sea: F. Lewis, 1939).

13 Correspondence between Frank Lewis and Rex Silver, November 1953.

14 Alison Light, Common People: The History of an English Family (London: Penguin, 2014), xxii.

15 “A Studio of Design: An Interview with Mr. Arthur Silver,” The Studio 3 (1894): 119–120.

16 Arthur Silver, “The Preparation of Designs for Woven Fabrics,” in Practical Designing, ed. Joseph Gleeson White (London: George Bell & Sons, 1894), 61.

17 Mark Turner, A London Design Studio 1880–1963: The Silver Studio Collection (London: Lund Humphries for Middlesex Polytechnic, 1980), 31.

18 Protheroe, “Bloom and Blotch,” 26–27.

19 Correspondence between Miss Winifred Mold and Rex Silver, November 1928.

20 Silver Studio Diary, February 7, 1928.

21 Ibid., January 22, 1928.

22 Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003).

23 Silver Studio Diary, May 23, 1928.

24 Ibid., February 22, 1928.

25 Ibid., December 17, 1928.

26 This is recorded as having been designed by Lewis Jones in 1928 (Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, SD13726). Presumably, the words “pottery plate” indicated the source of inspiration rather than the intended use.

27 Ibid. The South Kensington Museum (SKM) had been renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in 1899, but clearly by 1928 the abbreviated version of the old name was still in colloquial use.

28 Correspondence between the Silver Studio and Denby & Son, December 19, 1928. Design number 2006, to which both letters refer, must be a sample of a textile belonging to Denby & Son as it does not relate to the Silver Studio’s records.

29 Correspondence between Denby & Son and the Silver Studio, December 19, 1928.

30 Nothing more is known about either of these designers; even Cyril’s surname is not noted in the Silver Studio’s records.

31 Silver Studio Time Book, 1928

32 Michael Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

33 Protheroe, “Bloom and Blotch,” 29.

34 Carma R. Gorman, “Reshaping and Rethinking: Recent Feminist Scholarship on Design and Designers,” Design Issues 17, no. 4 (2001): 72–88.