Center for Design and Material Culture

textile with tassles hanging down

The Center for Design and Material Culture is the primary destination for the multi-disciplinary study of material culture and design at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

EXPLORE OUR COLLECTION AND GALLERIES

Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection

The Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection is one of the nation’s largest university-held textile collections with over 13,000 textile artifacts spanning 16 centuries and 108 countries.

Ruth Davis Design Gallery

The Ruth Davis Design Gallery is an exhibition space focused on the processes and results of design. Exhibitions include national, international makers, and students from the School of Human Ecology’s Design Studies program.

Lynn Mecklenburg Textile Gallery

The Lynn Mecklenburg Textile Gallery provides a space dedicated to rotating exhibitions of the School of Human Ecology's Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection.

Featured Exhibitions & Events

Rapid Response Mask Collecting Project

This exhibition seeks to understand the new ways in which textiles play a critical role in our daily lives as protective face coverings. To do so, it uses a "rapid response" collecting model to select masks for the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection which mark this contemporary moment as historic.

Residential Design for Health and Longevity

Join Cynthia Leibrock, author, lecturer, and designer, for a virtual tour of her universally designed home that encourages healthy lifestyles and design that allows aging in place.

Upcoming Events

Research Opportunities

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It’s #DesignThinking Thursday and we are looking at Functional Fashions. . Functional Fashions was a collaborative effort amongst nearly 30 American fashion designers between the mid-1950s and 1970s to create clothes for disabled bodies. It was a movement catalyzed, in part, by the homecoming of numerous disabled vets in the wake of WWII and the growing demand for unrestrictive clothing designs for women, which led to new approaches to thinking about design. . The Functional Fashions label also appeared on clothing that was not expressly designed for the disabled but was accessible nonetheless. In many cases, this included Bonnie Cashin pieces much like this 1968 skirt and poncho set from #HLATC for the ease of dressing and movement that they afforded wearers. Many pieces designed during this movement share a noticeable lack of buttons or fastenings – a sophisticated solution for wearers with limited mobility. . To learn more about Functional Fashions, listen to Design History PhD student Natalie Wright's interview with Radio Chipstone. In this episode, Wright discusses the mental shift that led to Functional Fashion, a shift that resituated the problem of ill-fit or narrow use onto the clothing, rather than the body of the wearer. . Listen here: http://www.chipstone.org/content.php/19/Radio-Chipstone . Radio Chipstone is curated by material culture scholar, Gianofer Fields. Episodes air every Thursday between 6 and 7 pm on WORT 89.9 FM. Tune in tonight right here: . https://www.wortfm.org/news-talk/radio-chipstone/ . . . . #FunctionFashion #MaterialCulture #Fashion #disabledbodies #disabilityStudies #doesithavepockets #OOTD #design #matcult

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We are so proud to share another virtual exhibition: Intersections: Indigenous Textiles of the Americas curated by…

Posted by Center for Design and Material Culture on Monday, July 13, 2020