In 1969, as Bedford-Stuyvesant emerged as a center of Black political and cultural life, an unlikely partnership was taking shape in the Brooklyn neighborhood. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, one of the most recognizable women in America, was helping launch a Black-run textile studio whose fabrics drew from African art and craft and whose mission extended beyond design: create jobs, cultivate local talent and make Black pride tangible in the homes of American consumers.
The studio, Design Works of Bedford-Stuyvesant, would eventually exhibit its textiles in museums, attract national attention and license its patterns to manufacturers across the country. Yet its history has largely faded from public memory. Now, more than five decades later, design historian Phyllis Ross is recovering that story in "Stories in Fabric: The Design Works of Bedford Stuyvesant," published this month by Columbia University Press.
Ross discovered Design Works while working on an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York about textile designers Leslie and D.D. Tillett. The Tilletts had experience creating cottage industries in developing communities and Onassis approached them after the assassination of her brother-in-law, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, whose vision for Bedford-Stuyvesant centered on private investment to strengthen the neighborhood’s economy.
Design Works was established under the auspices of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, founded by Kennedy in 1967. Its ambitions reflected the era’s intersecting movements for Black Power, Black Pride and economic self-determination. The studio’s designers looked to African art and craft for inspiration, transforming motifs and forms into repeating patterns for textiles and other consumer goods.
“It was an African-American company,” Ross said. “And it embodied a level of Black pride that was exemplified by the aesthetic program that Design Works chose to follow, which was to create designs inspired by African art and craft.”
The company’s cultural ambitions, however, were complicated by the economics of running a business. Design Works initially relied on labor-intensive, hand-printed, silk-screened fabrics — a model that could create jobs and provide training but proved difficult to sustain financially.
After several years without achieving the hoped-for profitability, the company shifted toward licensing its designs to manufacturers producing goods for a national market.
The pivot worked. Licensing made Design Works profitable for several years, but it also required far fewer workers, exposing a fundamental tension between the company’s social mission and its economic reality.
"The company began to receive a huge amount of publicity," Ross recalled. "And like any other, the business plan was very optimistic. There was a tremendous incentive to look for alternative paths to profit and what emerged was the possibility of licensing designs to manufacturers of mass consumer goods."
At its height, however, Design Works was hardly obscure. In 1971, its fabrics transformed the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s five-story Great Hall into a showroom, while the Grand Staircase became a stage for gospel, blues and jazz performances. Onassis attended wearing a pendant designed by Design Works, an image that circulated in newspapers around the country and helped cement her association with the company.
For Ross, the studio’s disappearance from the historical record reflects a broader problem: short-lived experiments in craft and design are easily forgotten, even when they leave lasting marks on the people who participate in them. Many Design Works employees went on to careers in textiles and design, carrying skills developed inside the Bedford-Stuyvesant workshop with them.
Ross began her research more than a decade ago without intending to write a book. What initially seemed like an obscure chapter of design history became increasingly relevant as she uncovered questions about race, economic opportunity, cultural representation and community development that remain pertinent today in the face of gentrification in Bed-Stuy.
“I just wanted to investigate, explore,” Ross said. “But as the material built up, and as I understood more about the context, it became this wonderful project.”
Stories in Fabric: The Design Works of Bedford Stuyvesant is available online.
