Ralph Lauren may have built an apparel empire out of romantic interpretations of Americana, but his nephew Greg Lauren is giving credit to authentic American creators.
“I like the recognition we’re getting…Greg is giving us the credit,” said Mary Margaret Pettway. The Gee’s Bend point person on the project, Pettway started quilting at age 11, and her mother’s work was in the landmark 2002 exhibition “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” at the Whitney Museum in New York.Lauren got his start as a fine artist challenging romantic archetypes through the materials he used. An art show in Los Angeles in 2010 featured suits made of crumpled paper.
“Before quilting became popular, it was a lost art pretty much because we’re losing so many traditional things we used to do just to make do,” explained Pettway.Like many, Lauren was first exposed to quilts as an aesthetic, when he began researching them for a 2018 collection. “I Googled quilts, saw geometric red and white images, screen-shot them and up they went on the mood board,” he said.
“I don’t want to indict other designers,” he said when asked about that. “I believe in approaching our relationships with other communities, with marginalized communities, in a more responsible way than it’s been done before. With this we set out to create a proper model through which creatives should and can collaborate with artists and artistic communities, and one that is about volition and consent.
Each quilter came back with choices of fabric, and was sent a quilting kit with yardage and bins of scraps, from tweeds to men’s wear suiting to nylon to denim and workwear. The resulting 93 garments, priced commensurate to the artwork at $5,000 to $10,000, will be in the Bergdorf Goodman men’s store through Nov. 8. “Combining brown and cream herringbone and houndstooth with orange twills and nylons and bold blue linens, it’s incredible. They opened my eyes to textiles I’ve known my entire life,” said Lauren.
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