by
Lynn Felsher
The textile designer, Wesley Simpson was a man of many talents and energy. A designer of printed fabrics for women’s apparel, scarves and furnishing fabrics, he produced thousands of designs in a career that began in the early 1920s and continued through the late 1940s.
As a designer of fashionable rayon prints, Simpson sold his designs to fashion designers, department stores and to the pattern companies—Vogue and McCall’s. His name and that of his company, Wesley Simpson Custom Fabrics, Inc. was used on all his advertising that appeared in the leading American fashion magazines of the 1940s—VOGUE, HARPER’S BAZAAR and MADEMOISELLE.
In the early 1940s, Simpson commissioned several artists to create new designs for his firm. Among them were Salvador Dali, Marcel VertËs, Ludwig Bemelmans, and John Reynolds whose work he promoted in various ads, linking their names with fashion designers who used their designs--Adrian, Claire McCardell, Hattie Carnegie, Tina Leser, Herbert Sondheim, and his wife Adele Simpson. Simpson was well aware of the value of advertising and linking his name with artists Dali and VertËs and several of the important fashion designers brought a certain cachet and notoriety to his company.
It is significant that Wesley Simpson was successful through the early post-WWII period and appears to have concluded his business just as the new period of modernism was taking hold. This paper will examine Simpson’s role as designer and entrepreneur in a period when there was strong public awareness of the textile company. It will also examine the organization of his firm, the special role of the artist as designer in the context of the 1940s, and then assess how the company was viewed by its competitors and in the public market place.
Lynn Felsher is Curator of Textiles at The Museum at FIT. She recently co-curated the exhibition Red (2002) and curated A Woman’s Hand: Designing Textiles in America, 1945-1969 (2000), The Saris of Princess Niloufer (1997), and Extravagant Lengths: Velvet Plush and Velveteen (1991). She has also served as coordinator for such exhibitions as C’AD Infinitum (1998), From Printed Line to Woven Flower: Exploring Textile Design (1996) and Beyond Tradition: Lao Textiles Revisited (1995). From 1987 to1990 she served as adjunct instructor in Textile/Surface Design Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Among her most recent presentations were “Textile Sample Books Reassesd” (2000) at the Winchester School of Art in Winchester, England; “Vally Wieselthier” (1998) at the Society of Architectural Historians, annual meeting; and “Textile Study Collections and Public Accessibility” (1996) at the European Textile Network conference in Manchester, England. She also received a New Jersey Historical Commission Oral History Grant to interview workers in the Paterson, New Jersey silk industry.