Artist Textiles at the Fashion and Textile Museum

Entry: £8.80 adults / £6.50 concessions / £5.50 students

The Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey currently has a great exhibition of textiles designed by fine artists of the 20th century. Ranging from the 1910s to the 1960s, it shows how loose the boundaries between art and commercial design really are, showcasing mass-produced printed textiles by artists including Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Joan Miró.

The material on show is primarily textile samples. There are also plenty of items of clothing, some advertising material, and some surrealist film footage. Overall it's a fun, light-hearted exhibition – you get the sense that the artists got a chance to kick back and play around with themes and motifs they were best-known for when doing this kind of commercial design work. It's also fascinating to see how these artists embraced the opportunity to make their work more widely available to the public; Picasso was even involved in designing prints for a range of skiwear! I was surprised by how much I liked Andy Warhol's simple, playful designs, and I loved Dalí's “Desert Rocks” fabric.

Overall, I spent an enjoyable hour looking around, although I suspect that the price is off-putting unless you're particularly into textile design.

Kaffe Fassett: A Life in Colour at the Fashion and Textile Museum

I feel that perhaps I should have heard of Kaffe Fassett prior to visiting this exhibition. He's a quilter and a hand knitter! He's created knitting patterns for Rowan! Never mind though, this show did an excellent job of introducing me to his work.

At £8 it's a more expensive exhibition than I usually go to, but I felt as though I got value for money. There's a huge selection of Fassett's work on display and it's all so colourful and dramatic that you could spend hours taking it all in. It's thin on details accompanying the works; there are some pieces of text that touch on the main points of Fassett's career, but not much about the individual pieces beyond titles and dates. However, the bright, bold patterns, the unexpected images and the varied textures did a good job of cheering me up during the grey English summer.

Horrockses Fashions at the Fashion and Textile Museum

Entry: £6.50 adults / £3.50 concessions

My interest in textiles has never really translated into an interest in fashion. Clothes aren't something I care about in and of themselves, I'm more interested in the materials. Which is a nice way of saying that I wasn't particularly excited about this exhibition at the Fashion and Textiles Museum in Bermondsey.

I was completely wrong. Of the exhibitions on the list that I've been to so far, this was by far and away the best.

The exhibition focuses on Horrockses Fashions in their heyday, the 1940s and 1950s. Horrockses was a British firm specialising in off-the-peg women's clothing, which stopped trading in the early 1980s. They're remembered today for their brightly-patterned cotton dresses, but they also made evening dresses and housecoats, and had a children's range called Horrockses Pirouette. Having said that, it's easy to see why the company's remembered for the sun-dresses – they're so colourful! Even after 50 years the clothes on display look amazing, all bright,cheerful colours and crazy abstract patterns.

While there are plenty of clothes on display there's also lots of information about both the company and the designers that worked there. There are sketchbooks used by the company's designers on view, along with things like the garment sketches that were sent to the manufacturers. There's also lots about how they marketed their clothes, and the company really did appear to set about “positioning the brand” in a way that seems very modern. (One of Horrockses' best ideas was to commission pattern designs from contemporary artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi to supplement the work of their in-house design team. I have to say, it's quite a difference from Topshop's Kate Moss range)

So, it was informative, well-organised and colourful – I loved it and I may well be back on 24th September as Pat Albeck, one of Horrockses' key designers in the 1950s, will be discussing her work with curator Dennis Northrup that evening.