Collective Threads

Anna Andreeva (1917–2008) was a Russian textile designer and leading artist at the famous Red Rose Silk Factory in Moscow 1946–84. Named after the Polish-German socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, the factory was a site of collective female design labour that shaped the fashion and material culture of late socialism. Andreeva’s spectacular patterns range from the abstract and geometric — recalling the early Soviet avant-garde — to the cosmic and space-age to the cybernetic to the gorgeously-stylised floral to elegantly-schematised narrative pictures of Moscow, electrification, the cinema, Russian folk art and Central Asian motifs. Her designs for mass production were among the most popular textile prints distributed within USSR in the 1960s and 1970s. Collective Threads showcases Anna Andreeva’s outstanding art through reproductions of her drawings, sketches, and historic fabric samples as well as documents from the Red Rose factory collective, Soviet fashion magazines, and images of international exhibition designs. The illustrations are supplemented with essays contributed by international scholars, curators, and critics who explore Andreeva’s work and career and place it in historic and artistic context.