The Textile Hive has just made the contents of the Andrea Aranow Textile Archive accessible for educators, individuals, and organizations with a new app and membership program. Founded by Andrea Aranow, the project was moved to Portland in 2009 by her son, founder and interface designer Caleb Sayan. The digitization of the project seeks to preserve and share decades of textile history which includes manufacturing techniques and over 40,000 specimens gathered from 50 countries. Each piece in the archive was captured into hi-res images and then cataloged using a 2,300-term custom taxonomy, allowing users to search fabrics by era, culture, material, scale, patterns and other fields.

Aranow first began collecting textiles in the mid-’70s before returning to New York in 1987 to start Andrea Aranow Textile Documents, which sourced pieces from its collection to fashion companies. Since then, its expertise has continued to serve the design industries including apparel, footwear, wallpaper, stationary and upholstery with past clients including Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton, UNIQLO and Abercrombie & Fitch.

To learn more about the project and program, check out The Textile Hive website.