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This extensive work dedicated to the unique textile art of Bhutan is an impressive illustration of how closely art, spirituality, and life are interwoven in the last of the Buddhist kingdoms in the Himalayas.

This paper examines the relationship between craft and popular culture by focusing on a peculiar type of textile sampler (needlework) that used to be omnipresent in the last century both in rural and urban houses across Central and South-Eastern Europe. Although these hand-crafted items are no longer part of today’s ‘compulsory’ household, they are still regarded as nostalgic, familiar or emotional forms of materiality and tangibility which perform a cultural politics of identity. These vernacular textiles predate the digital age and the free market and yet co-evolve and interact with digital networks and technologies. This paper brings into focus ‘amateur’ and regional forms of home grown cultural expression and the ways in which these forms of folk creativity and materiality are recast in contemporary urban popular culture and arts. Thus, the main aim of this study is to explore the contemporary re-enactments of these vernacular samplers.

The idea of fashion under socialism conjures up images of babushka headscarves and black market blue jeans. And yet, as Djurdja Bartlett shows in this groundbreaking book, the socialist East had an intimate relationship with fashion. Official antagonism--which cast fashion as frivolous and anti-revolutionary--eventually gave way to grudging acceptance and creeping consumerism. Bartlett outlines three phases in socialist fashion, and illustrates them with abundant images from magazines of the period: postrevolutionary utopian dress, official state-sanctioned socialist fashion, and samizdat-style everyday fashion. Utopian dress, ranging from the geometric abstraction of the constructivists under Bolshevism in the Soviet Union to the no-frills desexualized uniform of a factory worker in Czechoslovakia, reflected the revolutionary urge for a clean break with the past. The highly centralized socialist fashion system, part of Stalinist industrialization, offered official prototypes of high fashion that were never available in stores--mythical images of smart and luxurious dresses that symbolized the economic progress that socialist regimes dreamed of. Everyday fashion, starting in the 1950s, was an unofficial, do-it-yourself enterprise: Western fashions obtained through semiclandestine channels or sewn at home. The state tolerated the demand for Western fashion, promising the burgeoning middle class consumer goods in exchange for political loyalty. Bartlett traces the progress of socialist fashion in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, and Yugoslavia, drawing on state-sponsored socialist women's magazines, etiquette books, socialist manuals on dress, private archives, and her own interviews with designers, fashion editors, and other key figures. Fashion, she suggests, with all its ephemerality and dynamism, was in perpetual conflict with the socialist regimes' fear of change and need for control. It was, to echo the famous first sentence from the Communist Manifesto, the spectre that haunted socialism until the end.

Mary C. Beaudry mines archaeological findings of sewing and needlework to discover what these small traces of female experience reveal about the societies and cultures in which they were used. Beaudry's geographical and chronological scope is broad: she examines sites in the United States and Great Britain, as well as Australia and Canada, and she ranges from the Middle Ages through the Industrial Revolution. The author describes the social and cultural significance of \"findings\": pins, needles, thimbles, scissors, and other sewing accessories and tools. Through the fascinating stories that grow out of these findings, Beaudry shows the extent to which such \"small things\" were deeply entrenched in the construction of gender, personal identity, and social class.

Expanding from her own locus and cultural politics, Yee I-Lann unpacks and shifts understandings of places and histories through her artistic practice. In Kuala Lumpur, over roughly 25 years, she became an active participant in the film industry, punk rock scene, art world, as well as a vocal activist for environmental and sociopolitical issues. At the end of 2016, she returned from Kuala Lumpur to Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, her birthplace, where she began collaborating with weavers from the Sulu Sea and the Sabah interior, exploring how traditional and contemporary concepts and media might engage, expand, and change the world. In November 2019, she installed a 15-meter-long, double-sided woven mat, Tikar- A-Gagah (2019), at the National Gallery Singapore, and held an exhibition of weavings, \"ZIGAZIG ah!,\" at Silverlens Gallery in Manila. I sat down with the artist to discuss her multifarious work and her journey to \"find her mat.\"

Expanding from her own locus and cultural politics, Yee I-Lann unpacks and shifts understandings of places and histories through her artistic practice. In Kuala Lumpur, over roughly 25 years, she became an active participant in the film industry, punk rock scene, art world, as well as a vocal activist for environmental and sociopolitical issues. At the end of 2016, she returned from Kuala Lumpur to Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, her birthplace, where she began collaborating with weavers from the Sulu Sea and the Sabah interior, exploring how traditional and contemporary concepts and media might engage, expand, and change the world. In November 2019, she installed a 15-meter-long, double-sided woven mat, Tikar- A-Gagah (2019), at the National Gallery Singapore, and held an exhibition of weavings, \"ZIGAZIG ah!,\" at Silverlens Gallery in Manila. I sat down with the artist to discuss her multifarious work and her journey to \"find her mat.\"