When referring to all elements of adornment and modification of the body, the term dress is preferred among clothing and textiles scholars (Hillestad 1980; Roach-Higgins and Eicher 1992).
Along with such mouthwatering decorating-magazine fare, the book (by Linda Parry and David Cathers, the textile and furniture scholars) also analyzes 47 rugs, including Navajo weavings with mottled undyed wool and machine-made Morris carpets.
Ms. Hicks's life has been "a tissue of threads woven together on purpose or through chance, fertile encounters," wrote Monique Lévi-Strauss Lévi-Straussf textiles, in a 1973 catalog.
He had passed himself off as an Israeli scholar, a Lebanese textile merchant, and a thousand other things while trawling southern Asia for tourist victims as a drug-and-rob man.
He was supported, scholars say, by textile mill owners and the governing Congress Party because he was taking on their opponents.
The symbols are all explained in "Imperial Wardrobe," a 1990 book (reprinted in 2000 by Ten Speed Press) that Ms. Wrigglesworth wrote with Gary Dickinson, a fellow at the Royal Asiatic Society and recognized scholar of Chinese textiles.
This involvement is physical in Anna Sew Hoy's "Dreamcatcher," an elaborate, almost violent tangle of glazed clay, knotted rope and twisted fabric whose references to ceramics, scholar's rocks and endlessly recycled scraps of textiles mix cultures, crafts and social classes.
Ms. Salvador made a name for herself as a scholar of ancient Panamanian textiles, as well as serving on the faculty at the University of New Mexico and as the director of the Museum of Man in San Diego.
Beginning on Saturday, scroll paintings, sculptures, calligraphy, textiles, ritual objects and scholars' books from lenders in nine countries will be gathered at the Art Institute of Chicago for "Taoism and the Arts of China".
Since the end of World War II, when the United States helped Japan set up a strong textile industry, textiles and apparel have been a favorite pawn in global negotiations, said Ellen I. Rosen, a Brandeis University resident scholar.
