Collective Threads

Anna Andreeva (1917–2008) was a Soviet textile designer and leading artist at the famous Red Rose Silk Factory in Moscow from 1944 to 1984. The former Giraud silk factory, nationalized in 1919 after the October Revolution and renamed to commemorate the murdered Polish-German socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, became a site of collective female design labor that shaped the fashion and material culture of late socialism. Andreeva’s spectacular patterns range from abstract and geometric to cosmic and space-age and to pictorial themes of the city of Moscow and Russian folk art. Her mass-produced designs were among the most popular textile prints distributed within the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s.

Collective Threads contributes to the recent intensive interest in textile art by continuing the feminist emphasis on woman makers but shifting the focus from handmade women’s craft to a different model of industrial-scale textile production deliberately organized along collective lines within the Communist system. It showcases Andreeva’s outstanding art through reproductions of her drawings, sketches, and historic fabric samples as well as documents from the Red Rose factory, Soviet fashion magazines, and images of local and international exhibition designs. Essays contributed by international scholars, curators, and critics place Andreeva’s work and career in a historical and artistic context.