Marian Clayden (1937-2015)
Early Life
Marian Clayden (nee Bolton) was born in Preston in 1937. She studied education at Kesteven College in Lincolnshire and art at Nottingham School of Art. Having exhibited paintings at Preston’s Harris Museum on several occasions in the 1950s, she taught primary school in Nottingham and Chorley from 1957-62. However she left home and its textile connection to train as a schoolteacher, and it would be several years later and on the other side of the world that she would rediscover textiles and start her artistic journey. With two small children at home and a family to manage, she remembered a short class in colouring textiles while training to be a schoolteacher and thought: “I could try that in my kitchen”.
Discovering Dyeing
Marian had taken only one short dyeing class in college. During the 1960s in Australia with her husband and young children, she perfected her skills with the aid of ‘Tie Dye as a Present Day Craft’ written in 1964 by British author Anne Maile. In this technique, selected areas of cloth are prevented from taking in a dye by folding, tying or stitching prior to immersion. Soon Clayden became so fluent with these methods that she could exploit the inherent beauties of the techniques in a painterly way, and was exhibiting the resulting panels.
Moving to California with her family, in 1968 she showed her work to Nancy Potts, set and costume designer for the musical Hair. A commission resulted: to produce all the textiles for the subsequent nine tours of the show. In 1969 she began a collaboration with New York fashion and costume designer, Ben Compton. Soon she was working with others including Mary McFadden in New York, Rudi Gernreich in Los Angeles, and Cecil Beaton in London.
Clayden worked in her kitchen until 1971. Then a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts funded the conversion of her family’s garage into a workshop. There she produced larger, more three-dimensional pieces and smaller items ranging from fabric-covered boxes to dramatic accessories. Through Bob Mackie, who designed for major TV shows and movies, her fabrics were already dressing actresses such as Irene Papas and Lainie Kazan.
Marian and her husband Roger wearing garments Marian dyed, 1970s
Becoming Established
By 1972 Marian Clayden was well-established in the American ‘Fiber Art’ scene. In the following decade she participated in nine major invitational exhibitions across the United States and in Canada, England, Japan and Poland. Thereafter 19 international invitationals and six solo shows followed, introducing her work to additional audiences in Chile, France, Germany, India and more cities in Japan and the US.
Continually experimenting, she took a class in non-loom weaving in about 1973, leading to her creation of ropes from hand-dyed cotton roving and her use of industrial cotton strapping and ripped silk yardage. Her range of techniques expanded to include burning, brush-discharging and space-dyeing, an ikat technique in which fibres rather than yarns are dyed.
A year in Iran in 1975-6 introduced more new materials, shapes and colours to her oeuvre. This coincided with Clayden’s intense interest in clamped forms for dyeing and discharging, often combined with other techniques. When Clayden Inc was formed in 1981, initially producing one collection a year, the clamp-resist marks quickly became a signature of her work. Used on fabrics sourced from around the world and ranging from sheer organzas to robust chenilles, clamp shapes even appear in inkjet prints designed for a 2003 collection.
I enjoyed the clarity of the clamped edges – surrounded by the mystery of cloudy effects obtained by dip-dyeing. ...I would notice images similar to hieroglyphics emerging. ...The images could represent ancient symbols, but the strongest messages come from the process, from the material, from color, and from life.
Expansion and Innovation
By the mid-1980s the demand for Clayden’s distinctive garments was keen. In 1988 she began producing four collections a year. Now fully staffed – with Roger Clayden as business manager and Barbara Schinners (now Barbara Hume) assisting Marian with garment design – clothing was produced in a facility nearby in Los Gatos. Clayden remained the creative force in her home dyeing studio, where experiments were done. Once patterns and colours were created for the season, assistants Karen Livingstone and Lucina Ellis dyed to fill the orders.
Ever inventive, Clayden developed her experiments with household objects. In the mid-1980s she introduced her famous ‘toaster prints’, fabrics printed with a design created using a sandwich toaster. She also extended her range of dye-removal techniques, among which was ombré discharge, which produces subtle shading. Clayden’s interest in textures can be seen in her expanding use of dyed passementerie, pattern-woven fabrics intended for upholstery, and pile fabrics of various types.
Unique to her collections were cut velvet panels designed by the artist and woven for her in France. These contributed to her increasing success into the late 1990s, and to the widespread fashion for devoré, a cheaper means of producing a semi-sheer cloth with areas of pile. Now being sold in luxury department stores such as Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue, these and other understated, sensuous garments were worn by the likes of Cher, Sophia Loren, Diana Ross, Barbra Streisand, Elizabeth Taylor, Sigourney Weaver, Catherine Zeta-Jones and, in the films The Body Guard and She-Devil, Whitney Houston and Meryl Streep respectively.
Marian’s iconic ‘toaster print’ on indigo cloth, clamp resist
Global Sensibilities
Having lived in four countries and travelled around the world, Clayden’s trail-blazing textiles embody a global sensibility. She drew inspiration from Kabuki, opera and modern dance, from many countries’ garments and cloths, but also from her acute observations of nature, even taking inspiration from frond-wrapped palm trees. Passionate about sharing her knowledge, in the late 1970s she created three slide sets. These sold to colleges and workshop-leaders across the United States and Canada, demystifying her processes and influencing more than one generation of hand-dyers.
Often travelling in Europe to obtain textiles for dyeing, in 1992 she was invited by Aid to Artisans to work alongside Hungarian felt-makers. Among the results were a series of waistcoats using Hungarian felt. Inventive accessories followed, all transcending traditional folk-costume associations. At once bold and subtle, glamorous and experimental, in 1995 her garments garnered the Golden Shears Award of San Francisco’s Focus magazine. By 1998, and again in 1999, Clayden Inc presented amid the prestigious ‘7th on 6th’ catwalk shows held in New York City during Fashion Week.
In 2005, aged 67, Marian Clayden produced her last full collection. In 2007 the Surface Design Association celebrated her career with a retrospective exhibition in Kansas City; a larger retrospective opened in 2008 at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. In 2012 she was awarded the honorary degree, Doctor of Art, from Nottingham Trent University. Generous, with innate elegance and technical authority, Clayden by then was widely admired for her magical visual effects and extraordinary artist’s eye. She died in September 2015.
Jacquard-woven silk/rayon cut velvet gown, 1990s