Crypt, Cornucopia and the Surface of Pattern: Vlisco’s Designs

Abstract

This article argues that the development of highly patterned ‘African print’ textiles known as Dutch Wax print, which bring together designs from Indonesian batik, Indian ornamental protocols and West African chromatics with European fabric finishing techniques (often transferred from paper-making), is also the story of how Dutch mercantilism shaped commodities and taste across continents and cultures. I combine a symptomatic reading of the archives and design work at the Helmond headquarters of Vlisco, the most prestigious producer of Dutch wax, with an investigation into the relationship between mercantilism, religious wars and ornamentalism in the Low Countries. A thanatal, hallucinatory transoceanic design history emerges, attesting to Europe’s fraught relationship to African and Asian material culture. It asks us to read the textiles on which design coagulates as the very ground for the (re)ordered inscription of violence, guilt, trauma and material excess which the disorderly cornucopia of the design archive keeps generating.