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Silk: Fibre, Fabric and Fashion

NO. B110

Lesley Ellis Miller.

$95

Available: Shipping As Soon As Tomorrow

Thames and Hudson, 2021

Silk has long captured the imagination of peoples round the globe, inspiring creativity in the making of luxurious textiles. This major new survey draws on the exceptional collections of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and explores tradition and innovation across the history and geography of silk production, celebrating the ingenuity and skill of designers and makers. Structured by technique, from weaving and knitting to dyeing, printing and embroidery, this compendium showcases a rich variety of artworks, furnishings and clothing, including fashions from recent designer catwalk shows in North America, Asia and Europe. Silk will inform every student, connoisseur and admirer of beautiful textiles.

"Rug & Kilim has been a pleasure to work with from the very start of our relationship. Not only is their service outstanding, their inventory of one of a kind vintage rugs is unparalleled."

— Alan Eckstein and Margaret Goddard, Somerset House

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Specifications:

Measurements: 0'9" x 0'11" ( 0.24 m x 0.29 m )
Categories: Textile, Volumes
Classification: Tapestry & Textile
SKU: B110

From The Journal

Stories from the Volumes Collection

Essays, artist dialogues, and provenance notes drawn from Rug & Kilim’s editorial desk.

June 23, 2026

Rug & Kilim’s Tapestry Artists’ Series: In Dialogue with Joanne Soroka

There are artists who weave cloth and the ones who weave ideas. And then there are artists; rare, serious, working at a register that most practitioners of any medium never reach, who weave lives. Not their own lives, though those are present too, but the lives of people who left no other record: emigrants who crossed oceans under duress, ancestors who worked rivers in foreign countries, families scattered across continents by persecution and necessity and the simple human desire for somewhere better than where they were. Joanne Soroka weaves these lives. She gives them, as she has said herself, the meaning that history denied them. The loom, in her hands then, is an act of remembrance, slow, physical, irreversible, and as close to justice as textile art has ever come.

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June 10, 2026

Rug & Kilim’s Tapestry Artists’ Series: In Dialogue with Jeni Ross

There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has stood inside a Jeni Ross installation, when the room stops being a room. Not because the work overwhelms the space in the manner of spectacle not because it shouts, but because it restructures. A Ross textile does not hang on a wall so much as claim it, establishing a gravitational field of color and material density that reorganizes everything around it with the quiet authority of a load-bearing element. You do not look at a Jeni Ross. You adjust to it. You find your position in relation to it. The room, in the most literal architectural sense, has acquired a new wall.

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June 8, 2026

Rug & Kilim’s Tapestry Artists’ Series: In Dialogue with Elizabeth Chester

There is a particular kind of looking that a great tapestry demands, slower than painting, more physical than sculpture, closer to reading than to seeing. The eye must travel. It must follow the thread, understand the structure, and then, having understood it, surrender to the illusion that the structure has been designed to create. The greatest European tapestries have always operated this way: technically transparent to the scholar and visually overwhelming to everyone else simultaneously. It is the most demanding of the textile arts, and the one that rewards sustained attention most completely.

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June 1, 2026

The Layered Home: 5 Ways to Rethink Floor Rugs and Wall Tapestries

The real spatial dimension does not get painted, it gets woven. Begin with hanging a piece such as Signed Vintage Lia Cook Tapestry slightly off-center on one of your main walls. Its intricate Jacquard weave and the friction created between its rayon and linen fibers will require a lot of breathing room, immediately establishing a gravitational pull of the whole room. But to balance this vertical tension, the ground beneath your feet needs to become much more rigorous. With the use of a rigorously beaten warp-faced plane such as cotton Indian Dhurrie or Antique Swedish Röllakan's interlocking tapestry weave, you create a flat but structurally resistant base. A ground made from a rigidly woven material needs to be challenged. The last textural transition will come from placing a Vintage Frazada Kilim with heavy weft interlace across your warp-faced plane. The act of overlapping your heavy weft on a rigorously

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May 19, 2026

What William Morris, Paul Poiret, and the Bauhaus Each Understood About the Rug and What French Art Deco Proved

In the winter of 1883, William Morris stood before a room full of wool merchants, manufacturers, and assorted Victorian worthies in a lecture hall in Birmingham and said something that no one in that room was prepared to hear. The decorative arts, he told them, were not decorative at all. They were the most serious form of human making and their degradation under industrial production was not an aesthetic problem but a civilizational one. He had brought, as he often did, an Oriental carpet to make his point. Then he said, in effect: this is what we have lost the capacity to make, and until we recover it, we have no business calling ourselves a culture.

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November 13, 2024

Why are Vintage Rugs the Best Choices for Modern Spaces?

For centuries, the finest vintage rugs were reserved for the elite, gracing the palaces and religious edifices of nobility, kings, and rulers across regions like Persia, Anatolia, Central Asia, and India. Crafted with meticulous detail, these masterpieces received patronage from both Islamic and secular leaders, adorning opulent courts and becoming symbols of prestige and wealth. The modern world's fascination with Oriental rugs emerged in the 19th century, spurred by carpet exhibits in London and America. In 1877, Julius Lessing penned the first Western book on Oriental Carpets, solidifying their status as epitomes of high Islamic art. Today, Oriental rugs remain cherished collector's items, symbolizing luxury and elegance, with a permanent place in museum collections worldwide.

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Silk: Fibre, Fabric and Fashion

NO. B110

Lesley Ellis Miller.

$95

Available: Shipping as Soon as Tomorrow

Thames and Hudson, 2021

"Rug & Kilim is my go to resource for rugs. Their selection is wide and deep, and Josh’s eye for antique pieces is extraordinary. I always walk away with great pieces, and they are a pleasure to collaborate with. They’ve been my trusted partner on projects for years."

— Ann Wolf, Wolf Holden Design Studio

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View Similar

Specifications:

Measurements: 0'9" x 0'11" ( 0.24 m x 0.29 m )
Categories: Textile, Volumes
Classification: Tapestry & Textile
SKU: B110

Inquire About this Volume

Silk: Fibre, Fabric and Fashion

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Stories from the Volumes Collection

Rug & Kilim’s Tapestry Artists’ Series: In Dialogue with Joanne Soroka

Rug & Kilim’s Tapestry Artists’ Series: In Dialogue with Jeni Ross

Rug & Kilim’s Tapestry Artists’ Series: In Dialogue with Elizabeth Chester

The Layered Home: 5 Ways to Rethink Floor Rugs and Wall Tapestries

What William Morris, Paul Poiret, and the Bauhaus Each Understood About the Rug and What French Art Deco Proved

Why are Vintage Rugs the Best Choices for Modern Spaces?

Silk: Fibre, Fabric and Fashion

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