Textiles

Having officially become a category under the Wiener Werkstätte at the same time as the fashion sector, fabric design and textile production became yet another essential part of how the Workshops cultivated their brand and image. Utilizing the same approach to design as their furniture and woodworks, there was a greater emphasis on portraying the essence of nature in a way that did not focus itself on the small details, but instead, on the rejection of realistic depictions to deliver the same amount of information without sacrificing the quality of the imagery.

Otto Prutscher’s Chantilly (1905) fabric pattern is typical of textiles produced by the Wiener Werkstätte. Aside from the teardrop shape, all other silhouettes are geometric and the line weight remains consistent throughout the piece. Josef Hoffmann’s fabric Mushrooms (1903) is able to maintain the integrity of the common fungus without having to painstakingly render each detail by hand. The half circles used to convey the general shape of the mushrooms reveal just enough information for someone to be able to tell what it is. The fashion designers at the Wiener Werkstätte were also able to produce their own memorable articles of clothing using these patterns. One example is the Afternoon Dress (1906 – 1908) designed by Dagobert Peche and Eduard Josef Wimmer-Wisgrill. The garment was a favorite of Friederike Maria Beer, a devoted patron of the Workshops, and she was immortalized in Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Friederike Maria Beer (1916), wearing the same dress.