NEW YORK — The industriousness of one in every of America’s most achieved multidisciplinary designers, Dorothy Liebes, is on full display at a latest exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum here.

As a textile designer, weaver and color authority, she collaborated with such talents as Bonnie Cashin, Adrian, Frank Lloyd Wright, Raymond Loewy and Samuel Marx from the Nineteen Thirties to the ’60s. Working across sectors, Liebes had a hand in fashion, interiors, costume design, transportation and industrial design, combining vivid colours and interesting textures to assist modernize mid-Twentieth century design.

On view on the Upper East Side museum through Sept. 4, “A Dark, A Light, A Shiny: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” showcases textiles, fashion, furniture, personal documents and images. Featuring greater than 175 works — including textiles, textile samples, fashion, furniture, documents and images — the exhibition reveals her agility and hints at her interest in early modernist paintings.

A natural networker who traveled throughout the U.S. and abroad to know what other designers did, Liebes kept up with them because the years ticked by, based on Alexa Griffith, who curated the exhibition with Susan Brown. Liebes’ archives feature Christmas cards from notables like Noguchi and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Her Rolodex was crammed with other famous names like Henry Dreyfuss, Donald Deskey and Pauline Trigère — lots of whom weren’t merely business contacts but real friends like Cashin, who Liebes teamed with repeatedly. A very good amount of her contacts were compiled within the lead-up to Liebes serving as the manager director of the ornamental arts pavilion on the Golden Gate International Exposition, which was staged in her home state within the late Nineteen Thirties.

Nature was one other primary inspiration source, whether that be how Lurex could possibly be used to resemble sunlight sparkling on the water or a panache for the green and blue palette akin to the colours of trees and the sky, Griffith said. Enthralled by textile history, Liebes jetted off to Guatemala and other countries to study age-old techniques. Closer to home, she sought out authorities on the Institute of Tremendous Arts on such subjects as Persian velvet experts while studying for her master’s in Latest York. Her curiosity prolonged to European designers like Elsa Schiaparelli.

Not only curious about aesthetics and architecture, she was intrigued by how textiles functioned inside interiors to shape space and control light, based on Brown. Her own personal style was one other point of distinction and media descriptions. That elan helped facilitate her providing fabrics to manufacturers of hats, shoes and purses.

“Fashion was very much a through line from the start of her profession,” Brown said. “Although she did have a posh relationship with it. She was interviewed and recognized as a design authority in shelter magazines. But fashion, in fact, attempted to withhold the names of the individuals who designed the textiles.”

Noting how there are few examples where the textiles designer is known as in the style context, she said an exception is Liebes’ collaboration with Cashin for skirts, where they’re equally identified for that project. The Cooper Hewitt show demonstrates how design history has moved on from antiquated stereotypes, where women weren’t recognized for his or her contributions.

Liebes gravitated toward textile design early on, and she or he also grasped the business side by recognizing opportunities and what added value she could offer, comparable to luxurious textile fabrics for interiors that manufacturers and interior decorators could serve as much as their clients.

While working in Hollywood, Liebes met Cashin, who was working as head costume designer at Twentieth Century Fox at the moment. “The story goes that Bonnie saw a fantastic fabric on a chair and said she desired to make a coat out if it,” Brown said, adding that led to custom work and an in depth friendship.

Liebes’ textiles weren’t just sought out by the esteemed Head, but they were by others like Cedric Gibbons and Travis Banton. The Latest York transplant also crafted interiors for Hollywood power players like Joan Crawford.

Despite “hunting and hunting” for the 18-minute “Beauty by Design” film that was made when Liebes worked with DuPont, the curators have yet to search out it. Although there are a number of video clips featured within the show, they’re hopeful more footage may surface since Liebes commonly appeared on TV.

As for why Liebes “vanished from the narrative of American design history shortly after her death,” it was partially related to her not having had any children “to keep up her legacy or to establish her estate,” Brown said.

Cashin discussed attempting to keep the studio going after her death, but that proved to “not be possible,” Brown added. As well as, the early ’70s sparked an interest in fiber art, she added. And being undefinable could have been a deterrent. “The scope of her profession is so huge that it’s been a little bit hard for people to search out a way in,” Brown said.

Having spent 15-plus years researching Liebes’ work, Griffith agreed. “She was deeply curious about design within the broadest sense and was really participating in that conversation, from carpet consulting to international work, like attempting to revive the textile industry after the war and her fascinating work in fashion with Cashin. There are such a lot of interesting elements to her story that it resisted a traditional design history narrative. As much as she was omnipresent in magazines and newspapers during her life, the entire work that she did with Wright or Marx was deleted in favor of the story of the legend of the architect.”

Liebes opened a design studio in San Francisco in 1930 and maintained it for years. Her first marriage to Leon Liebes, whose affluent family owned the department store H. Liebes & Co., led to divorce. Her unpublished memoir described how he couldn’t tolerate her wanting to be a designer, and she or he couldn’t accept that, Griffith said. “Based on her, that’s why she left that marriage in the course of the [Great] Depression along with her clothes and loom.”

After wedding the American journalist Relman Morin, Liebes and her latest husband moved to the East Coast, where she arrange a Latest York studio in 1948 that became her foremost one after running two became “really overwhelming,” Brown said. “Although she was a California girl through and thru and had all the time hoped to retire there, unfortunately she died in Latest York before then.”

A “fairly exquisite” ’50s hostess apron with rows and rows of metallics from the gathering of fashion historian Sandy Schreier is a standout statement within the show, Brown said. One other attention-getter is one in every of the collaborative Cashin skirts that after belonged to Gypsy Rose Lee and is now a part of the Brooklyn Museum’s collection.

All in all, the joyfulness with which Liebes approached her work could inform future generations of designers, based on Griffith. “You possibly can see that this was someone who was very optimistic about American design and had an ideal passion for it. The crossover between fashion and interiors is an interesting story for young designers to take into consideration,” Brown said.

Liebes’ fame for revolutionary fabrics resonates today, when renewable and sustainable materials are of interest to “attempt to reverse a few of the damage that the style industry has caused to the environment,” she said.

After leaving her first husband “with anything that she could get her hands on for financial reasons,” the designer faced material shortages because of World War II rationing that led to her experimentation with alternatives to silk and other fabrics. Later in the course of the post-war period, an alliance with DuPont enabled her to shape the fibers and synthetics world by getting her revolutionary fibers into carpets, upholstery, handbags and fashion through her many personal connections, Brown said. She would also get feedback about what worked and what didn’t.

“That a part of her work makes her very contemporary in feeling,” she added.