Editor’s Introduction

The transmigration of objects between cultures, or even across time, always involves some change of meaning. This is especially true of items produced for the Chinese imperial court, where the status, appearance, and function of official goods was precisely codified. In her article “Other People’s Clothes,” Rachel Silberstein examines how the trade in secondhand clothing following the collapse of the Qing dynasty stripped garments of their specific role in the ritual and hierarchy of the court. What we now see in some Western museum collections as examples of Chinese textile art were once part of complex ensembles in which color, pattern, and symbol denoted the rank and function of the wearer. Peter Fox’s piece on the German designer Bernhard Pankok, a major figure of the Jugendstil generation, addresses the question of Phantasie, or imaginative expression, in the decorative arts. For Pankok, this quality was best seen in his designs for intarsia, a historic medium that he helped to restore to contemporary prominence. The material culture of the various pre-Columbian societies rarely appears in journals devoted to the history of design and the decorative arts. We are pleased, therefore, to be featuring Sarahh Scher’s article on the depiction of women, and especially their dress, in ceramic effigies from the ancient Moche civilization of Peru. This issue also carries the second part of Barbara Karl’s magisterial survey of the trade in Indian textiles to the European market between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In this concluding article, the author shifts her attention to the impact of Indian goods on European decorative arts.