It was a capsule line curated to excite American audiences, featuring big names from the art world, the buzziest commercial illustrators, and a celebrity athlete collaborator. Stehli Silks’ Americana Collection could have been competing for the American consumer’s attention today. Though highlights from the line read like notes from a contemporary marketing brief, the Collection was launched by the silk production giant in 1925. The textiles now only survive in archives, including the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art—where they were displayed in a show this spring. Yet the designs still have much to teach us: both about the art of collaboration and how new technologies, political machinations, and market imperatives shape artistic movements.
Stehli Silks began as a cotton weaving operation in 1837 in Obfelden, Switzerland, but soon switched to silk, developing textiles for clothing production. By 1897, the company was doing a brisk enough business in the United States that its patriarch and founder, Rudolf Stehli, sent his grandson Emil to establish a state-side operation, soon opening American factories to avoid the sting of the Dingley Tariff. Passed just after William McKinley’s election, the tariff was meant to protect domestic production and faced strong, divided party response, with claims that it would unfairly punish American consumers.
In the early 1920s, Stehli’s U.S. executives appointed promising twenty-five-year-old Kneeland L’Amoureux “Ruzzie” Green as creative director. A recent graduate of New York’s Art Students League, Green would later serve as creative director of Harper’s Bazaar. While at Stehli, Green met the American photographer Edward Steichen, who he invited to contribute to the Americana Collection. Steichen, who needed to support an ex-wife, a current wife, and aging parents, was eager for work and uniquely familiar with both European and American sensibilities, having been mentored by both Alfred Stieglitz and Auguste Rodin. To develop prints for Stehli, Steichen utilized household objects such as sugar cubes and match boxes, which were staged, abstracted, elevated, and lit in exquisite repetitive patterns. The manipulation of mass-produced items reflected the beginning of American artists facing modernism and finding, in the quotidian, beauty and movement.
The Americana Collection, meant to speak directly to a country with increasing interwar buying power, went on to feature designs from fifteen American artists. Ralph Barton, a cartoonist whose work appeared often in the New Yorker, made a contribution. Barton’s design for Stehli was titled “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” based on the novel by Anita Loos, later adapted to the now-famous film starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. At first resembling a series of treble and clefs, the pattern depicts a line of top-hatted hopeful suitors chasing a single marcel-haired blonde in a voluminous wrap while disdaining a series of bobbed brunettes. Rene Clark, a commercial art director whose images for Wesson Oil and other business monoliths were near ubiquitous, was also a collaborator. His “Stadium” design for Stehli plays with the textured density of hatted spectators in crowded stands. Helen Wills Moody, another collaborator, could well have been the stadium’s attraction. A tennis pro and amateur artist, her contribution to the Americana Collection fittingly features a woman in tennis attire at different stages of a serve. John Held, popular cartoonist of the flapper set, also created a printed silk for Stehli. Many of the silks recall the work of futurist artists such as Giacomo Balla or Jean Metzinger, and perhaps because of the collaboration’s breadth, the fabrics still appear remarkably wearable.
How successful was the scheme? By the 1930s, the U.S. branch of Stehli had surpassed the Swiss or, as a Time Magazine article put it: “Now the U. S. branch of the family business is four times as large as the sturdy Swiss parent.” But by 1932, Green had moved on to Harper’s Bazaar and though a material known as “rough silk crepe” briefly boomed for Stehli, wartime rations and the rise of synthetic materials contributed to the company’s eventual decline. Stehli’s U.S. factories, which in 1929 sold fourteen million yards—enough for five million dresses—closed for good in 1954. Stehli ceased business entirely in 1996. The Americana Collection, the elegance of the concept and the work produced, endures as a reminder of the inspiration that can strike at the intersection of artistic and commercial sensibilities.
Julia Berick is a writer who lives in New York. She has published with Vogue, The Paris Review, Harper’s Bazaar UK, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and elsewhere. She writes about craft and culture.
