The Art of Silk: How Ascher Scarves Made Modern Art Wearable

During the Second World War, Zika Ascher went to Henry Moore with a proposition that was modest in size and unusually ambitious in every other respect. He wanted the sculptor to design a square of cloth.

The dimensions, no more than thirty-six inches each way—were almost the only restriction. The image would not be carved in stone or cast in bronze. It would be printed onto fabric, folded at the throat, caught beneath a coat collar or tied over a woman’s hair. Once worn, parts of it would vanish. A figure might disappear into a pleat; a face might become a knot. The work would have to accept movement, touch and accident.

It was a serious idea disguised as an accessory.

The scarves that followed became known as the Ascher Squares. Designed by a remarkable company of modern artists and produced by Zika and Lida Ascher in London, they arrived at a moment when Europe was trying to recover not only its cities and industries, but its appetite for colour. They offered art without the hush of a gallery and modernism without the need to own a modern painting. A woman could buy one, wear it, fold it into a drawer and live with it.

That was the Aschers’ achievement. They did not simply reproduce art on fabric. They recognised that the silk square was an artistic form in its own right: intimate, mobile, technically demanding and capable of carrying an image into ordinary life.

In brief

Zika and Lida Ascher were Czech émigrés who settled in London after leaving Czechoslovakia in 1939, shortly before the Nazi occupation. They founded Ascher (London) Ltd in 1942 and built one of the most adventurous textile companies of the twentieth century.

Between the mid-1940s and the following decade, the Aschers commissioned leading European artists to create designs for square scarves and other textiles. Contributors included Henry Moore, Henri Matisse, André Derain, Jean Cocteau, Graham Sutherland, Alexander Calder, Marie Laurencin, Cecil Beaton and, in 1950, Pablo Picasso. The designs were translated into fabric using screen printing and produced in limited editions.

The Ascher Squares appeared at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Britain Can Make It exhibition in 1946, were shown at London’s Lefevre Gallery in 1947 and subsequently travelled internationally. Some were worn; others were framed. That ambiguity—scarf or artwork, wardrobe object or wall piece—is precisely what made them important.

The company later supplied fashion fabrics to leading couture houses including Christian Dior, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Lanvin-Castillo, Pierre Cardin and Yves Saint Laurent. Its legacy lies not in one famous print, but in a larger change of attitude: Ascher treated cloth as a place where art, industry and daily life could meet without any of them being diminished.

The honeymoon that became an escape

Before London, there was Prague. Zikmund Ascher was born there in 1910 into a Jewish family whose life was already bound up with textiles. Czechoslovakia possessed a sophisticated textile industry, and the Ascher family owned silk shops near Wenceslas Square. In 1933, Zika and his elder brother Josef opened a shop of their own in the centre of the city. It prospered.

Textiles were not Zika’s only distinction. He was also an exceptional and spectacularly fearless Alpine skier who represented Czechoslovakia internationally and won the Czechoslovak Grand Prix in 1938. His risk-taking on the slopes earned him the nickname that followed him for the rest of his life: the Mad Silkman. It sounds like a piece of advertising invented after success. In fact, it came first.

In February 1939, Zika married Ludmila Tydlitátová, known as Lida. They left for Norway on honeymoon only days before German troops entered Czechoslovakia on 15 March. From Scandinavia, the couple made their way to Britain. What had begun as a wedding journey became exile.

It is tempting, when looking back from the brilliance of the later scarves, to treat this as the dramatic first chapter of an inevitable success. Nothing was inevitable. They had lost the country in which Zika’s family, reputation and commercial knowledge were rooted. London offered safety, but also uncertainty, war and the practical difficulty of beginning again in an unfamiliar market.

Zika joined the army. In 1942, he and Lida founded Ascher (London) Ltd, printing fabrics for women’s clothing. The business belonged to both of them, and its story should be told that way. Zika became its restless public force, pursuing artists, experimenting with materials and building relationships with couture. Lida was his partner in the company and in the visual world it created. The surviving photographs of them examining designs together convey something more useful than the old mythology of the solitary male impresario: this was a shared life built through cloth.

Why ask an artist to design a scarf?

The proposition now feels natural because fashion houses have spent decades commissioning artists. In the early 1940s, it was far less obvious. The cultural hierarchy separating fine art from commercial textile design remained strong. A painting belonged in a gallery; a print might be editioned on paper; a scarf belonged to dress. Moving an artist’s hand from one category to another risked being dismissed from both directions—as commerce by the art world and as impractical indulgence by industry.

Zika Ascher saw the boundary as an opportunity. During the war, he became interested in the work of contemporary artists including Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and Ben Nicholson. Moore was the first major collaborator to engage deeply with the proposal. Between 1944 and 1946 he filled four sketchbooks with textile ideas, exploring figures, heads, ladders, insects and the strange organic geometries that already inhabited his sculpture and drawing.

This was not a matter of taking an existing Moore image and placing it on merchandise. The artist was thinking for cloth. A textile design has to repeat or resolve itself within a defined field. It must survive colour separation and printing. If it is intended for a scarf, it must also withstand folding: the composition needs interest at its centre, edges and corners because the wearer may reveal only one of them.

The square imposed discipline without dictating style. Within a maximum area of thirty-six by thirty-six inches, artists were largely free to decide what the object could become. Moore’s figures retained their monumental gravity, but the scarf changed their behaviour. On the wall they stood. On the body they moved.

A piece of modern art that could enter the wardrobe

The phrase “wearable art” is now applied so freely that it has nearly lost its meaning. The Ascher Squares deserve it in the literal sense. They were original works conceived by artists, translated through a demanding print process and released as objects that could be worn.

Screen printing—then often described as serigraphy when used for artists’ work—allowed each colour to be pushed through a prepared screen in a separate stage. The method could preserve the directness of a drawn or cut shape, but it required interpretation. Lines had to remain alive when enlarged. Uneven marks could not simply be tidied into sterility. Colours had to work not only beside one another, but within the sheen and movement of the fabric beneath them.

The Aschers became valued for this act of translation. Their role was neither that of passive manufacturer nor invisible printer. They helped artists understand the medium, tested how images behaved on cloth and found technical means of retaining the character of the original work. With Moore, the first design reportedly required months of trials. Fidelity did not mean copying every accidental mark. It meant preserving the artist’s handwriting after paper had become fabric.

Nor were all the famous “silk” squares actually made from silk. Wartime and post-war restrictions shaped what was available. Surviving Ascher designs were produced on rayon, cotton, parachute nylon and other fabrics as well as silk. Scarves sold in Britain were frequently rayon, while a large portion of production was reserved for export. The correction matters because the story becomes more impressive, not less. The Aschers did not wait for perfect circumstances. They made modern textiles from the materials a damaged economy could provide.

Britain needed colour

The earliest Ascher Squares belong to the emotional weather of post-war Europe. Britain had endured bombing, bereavement, shortages and years of clothes rationing. Utility regulations had made economy a public duty. Garments were expected to use material sensibly, avoid unnecessary ornament and last.

The end of war did not immediately end austerity. Rationing continued, fabric remained restricted and the national wardrobe did not burst into colour on command. Yet the desire for visual pleasure was unmistakable. A scarf answered that desire unusually well. It required less cloth than a dress or coat, could alter several existing outfits and introduced print close to the face. Even when a woman owned relatively few clothes, one square could change their character.

In 1946, examples from the project appeared at Britain Can Make It, the great post-war design exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The title now sounds almost touchingly emphatic. Britain had to prove that its manufacturing future could contain beauty as well as necessity, and that modern design might belong to reconstruction rather than privilege alone.

The Ascher Squares fitted this ambition perfectly. They brought together émigré enterprise, British production and an international group of artists. The project eventually involved dozens of contributors from across Europe and beyond. At a time when the continent had been divided by nationalism and war, a London textile company was quietly assembling another kind of European company—one held together by images, correspondence, screens and cloth.

Matisse, Moore, Cocteau and the problem of freedom

The roll call is extraordinary, but a list of famous names can conceal what made the project interesting. The artists did not produce a single recognisable “Ascher style”. They brought sharply different ideas about line, form and colour into the same physical format.

Henry Moore’s designs often retained the density of sculpture. Human figures appear as signs, arrangements and presences rather than fashion illustration. Three Standing Figures has the remote authority of an image discovered rather than decorated. In other works, ladders, heads and biomorphic shapes build patterns that remain unmistakably Moore even when they are wrapped around a body.

Jean Cocteau’s contribution relied upon the economy of his line. A face could be created with very little and still hold the whole square. André Derain brought figures and painterly colour. Alexander Calder’s vocabulary of discs, arcs and moving forms was particularly suited to a textile that would never remain still. Graham Sutherland’s organic imagery turned the surface stranger and less domesticated. Marie Laurencin, Cecil Beaton, Ivon Hitchens, Howard Hodgkin, Ben Nicholson and others added further voices.

Matisse was a particularly natural and consequential collaborator because textiles already occupied a central place in his imagination. He collected fabrics and used their pattern and colour throughout his painting. By the 1940s, ill health had led him increasingly towards cut paper, allowing him to compose directly with colour and scissors.

His Ascher scarf designs used that newly distilled language. Flat shapes and decisive colour could be translated with unusual clarity through the screen. The partnership also led beyond the wearable square to the monumental Océanie, le ciel and Océanie, la mer. The forms began with cut-paper shapes pinned across the walls of Matisse’s room—birds, fish, coral, leaves and drifting signs recalling the visual memory of Tahiti. To reproduce them at full scale, Ascher and Matisse rejected a photographic enlargement that felt lifeless and instead had the great wall compositions traced. The resulting linen panels were screen printed in 1948.

This episode reveals the intelligence behind the entire Ascher project. Reproduction was not enough. A technically accurate result could still betray the work if its energy had disappeared. The purpose of the textile process was to carry the life of the image into another material.

Picasso is often placed casually among the artists in the first Ascher series, but the chronology deserves greater care. The best-documented Picasso scarf followed in 1950. Screen printed in London on silk damask, it carries winged bulls, riders, foliage and suns arranged in a circular composition. Its printed inscription identifies it as being after a drawing by Picasso. It belongs to the wider Ascher story, but not to the initial 1946 launch. The distinction is small, yet it separates history from the flattering blur into which famous names too easily disappear.

What happens to art when it is folded?

A painting expects to be seen frontally and, usually, whole. A scarf cannot make that demand. It lives through partial views. Fold a square diagonally and its centre vanishes. Roll it into a narrow band and the border becomes the work. Tie it at the throat and one corner may fall forward while the rest is compressed into a knot.

This does not reduce the artwork. It introduces time. The image changes as the wearer moves and can be composed differently at every wearing. Silk catches light across the ridge of a fold, then loses it in the hollow beneath. A printed line appears, disappears and returns. The body becomes neither frame nor blank canvas, but collaborator.

The Ascher Squares therefore challenged more than the separation between art and fashion. They challenged the assumption that a serious artwork should remain fixed. Their incompleteness in wear was part of their character. A scarf could be known slowly, through handling and repetition, rather than absorbed in a single gallery view.

The irony is that many buyers framed them. Presented flat, the artist’s complete design could be preserved and read more easily. This response was encouraged in 1947 when the Lefevre Gallery—an established London gallery rather than a fashion showroom—mounted an exhibition of the Squares. The display treated them as pictures, and audiences followed. After London, the scarves travelled to exhibitions in cities including Zurich, Montevideo, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Sydney.

Was framing them a misunderstanding? Perhaps, but it was also evidence that the experiment had succeeded. The scarf had entered the gallery without surrendering its right to leave again.

From the square to haute couture

The artist scarves gave the Aschers visibility, but their influence extended far beyond the accessory. Ascher (London) Ltd developed printed silks, cottons, woollens, mohairs and experimental fabrics that were selected by major French, Italian and British fashion houses. Christian Dior, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Lanvin-Castillo, Pierre Cardin, Yves Saint Laurent, Mary Quant, Ronald Paterson, David Sassoon and Alberto Fabiani all appear in the documented history of the company’s clients.

The Dior relationship is substantial, although it should not be reduced to the frequently repeated claim that Ascher supplied the fabric for the original 1947 New Look. The firmer evidence is more specific and more interesting. Dior’s spring–summer 1953 collection included an afternoon dress named Jardin Japonais, made in an Ascher screen-printed silk called Blue Bird. Here the textile did not merely fill a silhouette devised elsewhere. Its colour and imagery became part of the identity of the dress.

The relationship between Ascher and couture also created space for a new generation of textile talent. In the late 1950s, the Trinidad-born designer Althea McNish was introduced to Zika Ascher by Arthur Stewart-Liberty. Ascher immediately recognised the originality of her work. Her designs for the company, often printed on silk, were selected by couture clients including Dior. McNish brought the colour, vegetation and visual energy of a “tropical eye” into British textile modernism, expanding the Ascher story beyond its celebrated first generation of European artists.

This is an important part of the legacy. The company’s great skill was not simply persuading already famous people to decorate fabric. It was recognising visual intelligence and giving it an industrial life.

Why original Ascher scarves are collectible

The collectibility of an Ascher scarf begins with authorship, but it does not end there. Many of the artist squares were made in small, numbered editions. The printing screens were destroyed after production, preventing the original editions from becoming indefinitely repeatable products. Scarcity was built into the object rather than added later as a marketing description.

Condition now matters enormously. Scarves were made to be handled, folded and worn, so immaculate survivors are naturally uncommon. Silk may weaken, colours may fade, hems may become damaged and the repeated folds of use may leave permanent lines. Provenance matters too, particularly where artist, date, edition and manufacture can be documented.

The strongest examples now occupy an unusual collecting category. They belong to fashion history, textile design and modern art at once. Institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Henry Moore Foundation, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Institute of Chicago preserve Ascher-related works. Matisse’s large Océanie textiles have entered major art collections as works in their own right. A Picasso scarf held by the National Gallery of Victoria is catalogued with Ascher Ltd as manufacturer and Picasso as designer. The museum label settles the old argument very neatly: both names are necessary.

Yet auction prices are not the most interesting measure of their importance. The greater achievement is that the scarves have survived every category into which they were placed. They remain desirable as fashion, studied as textiles and exhibited as art.

What people get wrong about Ascher scarves

They were not all made from silk

The name “Ascher silk scarf” is often used for the whole project, but scarcity and post-war restrictions meant that designs were also printed on rayon, cotton and parachute nylon. Material should be established object by object.

The artists did more than lend their names

The best collaborations were conceived for textiles. Henry Moore produced extensive original studies, while Matisse’s work with Ascher became part of the development of his late cut-out practice. These were not ordinary branded reproductions.

Picasso was not part of the earliest launch in quite the same way as Moore

Picasso belongs to the Ascher history, and a documented scarf dated 1950 survives. Presenting him as one of the artists behind the first 1946 group, however, compresses a project that developed over several years.

Ascher did not single-handedly create Dior’s New Look

Ascher fabrics were used by Dior and other leading couturiers, but the evidence supports specific later garments and collections more securely than the sweeping claim that Ascher textiles formed Dior’s original 1947 New Look.

Zika was not the whole company

The force of his personality made Zika the most visible figure, but Ascher (London) Ltd was founded with Lida and belongs to their shared history. Describing her only as the wife who continued his legacy reverses the facts as well as diminishing her: Lida died in 1983, nine years before Zika.

The legacy of Zika and Lida Ascher

Lida Ascher died in London in 1983. Four years later, the Victoria and Albert Museum mounted a major retrospective of the company’s work. Zika died in 1992. Their archive, preserved by the family, has since supported renewed scholarship and exhibitions, including the extensive Mad Silkman: Zika & Lida Ascher—Textiles and Fashion exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague in 2019.