Charlotte Jirousek
Applies Historic Dress, Textiles, and Textile Technologies to Design

Have you considered using historic garments as apparel and textile design inspiration? Have you ever seen a garment detail and wondered how to reproduce it? Have you had questions about printing, dyeing, and embellishment techniques? Professor Charlotte Jirousek is someone you should know about.

As Curator of the Cornell Costume Collection, a comprehensive collection of 9,000 textile and costume items dating from the 18th century to the present, Professor Jirousek is an expert on the history of dress, garment construction, historic and ethnic textiles, and textile technologies. The Costume Collection contains both American and ethnographic clothing and textiles and is a tremendous resource to apparel and textile designers and manufacturers. It can provide design inspiration as well as insight into successful construction techniques of the past. Professor Jirousek has created an on-line catalog of the collection which you may access at to browse or search for something specific (See address below). To view large photographs of those items listed with photographs, go the table view, and double click on the number in the far left column to see an enlarged version of those photographs. If you would like to look more closely at actual garment or textile details, you may make an appointment to come work with Professor Jirousek at Cornell. She can discuss historic and ethnic designs and the feasibility of replicating them using commercial techniques.

Professor Jirousek has broad design interests. She teaches a course on design foundations for which she has written a visually stimulating on-line textbook that will provide you with design inspiration. It can be found at char.txa.cornell.edu . She also teaches a course on color and surface design of textiles, reflecting her interests in textile dyeing, printing, and embellishment. In connection with these courses, Professor Jirousek uses and teaches her students to use Adobe Photoshop computer software for surface and apparel design applications, for example to develop design repeats for commercial applications.

Professor Jirousek's research has centered on textiles and dress in Turkey , long important in the history of textile design and trade. She is interested in the interaction between East and West in design and dress, and has focused on the rapidly disappearing traditional textile technologies of Turkey . This research exemplifies her broad interests in world cultural influences on fashion and the globalization of fashion.

Some questions you might ask Charlotte Jirousek:

• What are some printing, dyeing, and embellishment techniques used on textiles?
• Are these techniques able to be commercially developed to look like the handcraft techniques?
• What are some sources for historic or ethnic textile design?
• What computer software is available for me to develop a repeat design that can then be reproduced commercially?
• How can Photoshop software be used for surface and apparel design?