Textiles from Jackie Kennedy's 1970s Apartment Are Back on the Market
In November 1971, House Beautiful ran a story on the New York apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Aristotle Onassis—the latter better known as Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, onetime beloved First Lady and passionate activist and philanthropist. Among the apartment's decor were several eye-catching fabrics, including a sofa covered in a plum pattern and a tablecloth made from a graphic block print. These were more than just bold interiors choices by Mrs. Onassis—they were the result of a collaboration between a Brooklyn community development program and a favorite textile company of well-heeled socialites.
Now, that textile company, Tillett, is bringing these fabrics back to market.
Founded in the 1940s by D.D. and Leslie Tillett, Tillett Textiles attracted such starry customers as Babe Paley, Brooke Astor, and Loulou de la Falaise (in addition, of course, to Jackie—then Mrs. Kennedy). Jackie Kennedy was inspired by her brother-in-law Robert F Kennedy's community development program, the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, to support Brooklyn artists through a creative endeavor—so she turned to the Tilletts, with whom she had already worked to devise fabrics for her residences at The White House as well as in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod.
Thus was born Design Works Bedford-Stuyvesant, a community-driven nonprofit that bolstered artists from Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood by partnering them with Tillett to learn the printing process and put their fabrics into production.
"What my grandparents loved as artists, and how they spent their life, was teaching," says Patrick McBride, Tillet's current owner. The Tilletts had worked on several partnerships with makers and manufacturers overseas, but Design Works was their first official foray into working with an American nonprofit.
Given the inexact science of archiving and the fact that Design Works shut its doors in 1979, several of the patterns from the collection have ended up with uncertain attribution. Some, McBride says, are in the public domain, others preserved in the Tillett archive, and still others ended up licensed to different fabric companies (including one that made its way to Schumacher). As such, when McBride decided to gather up all these patterns for a revival collection, it was a bit of a scavenger hunt; hurdles included torn and damaged screens he had to replace or fix. He's also chosen to rebuild some screens to print at the wider width that has become more common since the originals were made.
Among the patterns McBride has chosen to revisit is the one that graced Mrs. Onassis's dining table in 1971, a design by Calister Thomas, the first head of Design Works. Tillett is reprinting it in the hue she had as well as a more multicolored version.
The House Beautiful article on the Onassis home was preceded by a story in that same issue on the initiative, detailing the process at Design Works under Thomas. "The designs are generally bold in concept and color with a strong African feeling," reads the article. "Mr. and Mrs. Onassis have used the Design Works fabrics in bold prints as startling accents in their New York apartment."
Before landing in the pages of House Beautiful, though, the first results of the program were displayed in a glittering party at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1971, with a guest list that included Diana Vreeland, Babe Paley, Ethel Kennedy, Bunny Mellon, and more society figures mingling with the artists behind the bold prints hung from the high ceilings.
But you don't have to be a socialite to get in on the fun—nor even a professional designer, at that: McBride is currently selling a selection of tote bags in the reissued fabrics through the Tillett Instagram account on a first-come, first-serve basis, with proceeds benefitting the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club. He will continue to print reissues as he receives interest (a stance Tillett can take given that its fabrics are all hand printed to order in a workshop in Sheffield, MA overseen by McBride and his mother). "This is the history of Tillett—this is what it's all about; we want to engage with this history and continue to create," says McBride.
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