Excerpt from Footprints in the Desert Sand, a promotional catalogue published by T. Eaton Company in the 1920s
Hidden routes
In the early 1900s, a group of T. Eaton Company buyers travelled from Toronto and Winnipeg to North Africa, the Middle East, and West Asia in search of antique and semi-antique rugs that would later join retail showrooms, private collections, and public museums across Canada. From the 1910s to the 1950s, these journeys were also common practice among small retailers and other department stores keen to advertise ‘adventurer’ and connoisseur imagery to promote sales of ‘orientalia’; the catch-all term used by Europeans and Americans in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century to categorize objects primarily attributed to Islamic cultures. As 2021 Curator in Residence at the Textile Museum of Canada, I quickly became interested in connecting this movement of ‘orientalia’ to colonialism and imperialism on our walls and under our feet. More specifically, I became interested in how tracing the journey of a textile may tell us as much about its social history as the knotting, dyes, and patterns which characterize it.
Published in HALI Magazine (Winter 2021)