Courtesy Tom Marble

The artist’s collection of Vera scarves, Los Angeles, 2008

Courtesy Joe Goode

Pae White

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In Pae White’s Los Angeles studio, Vera scarves dating from the 1940s through the early ’90s are scattered in a multicolored heap across the floor. The scene resembles an explosion in a textile factory. In fact, the artist’s studio houses only part of her vast collection of scarves featuring everything from hand-drawn scenes of exotic holiday destinations to waves of Op art geometry. “I probably have 20 of those 20-gallon containers,” says White, gesturing to a stack of translucent tubs stuffed with crumpled scarves. For White, the scarves’ featherweight nature and midcentury design aesthetic have been a continual source of artistic inspiration. Since 1990, White has been exhibiting post-Conceptualist work—sculpture, installation, and interventionist graphic design—that mines the territory between fine and applied art. Her works include cascading paper mobiles, tapestries woven with photographic images, and standing screens depicting liberated fashion accessories. She has also utilized her Vera scarves. For the 1995 group exhibition “Pure Beauty,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, White presented the scarves sandwiched between sheets of glass as part of an installation. “I liked that a piece of fabric, an Arne Jacobsen chair, and an ashtray could suggest the passage of time and offer a moment of contemplation,” she notes. When White was invited to paint 15 sedans for the Frieze Art Fair in 2004, she composed a delicate pastel palette based on dawn and dusk skies and painted each car with wide pale stripes reminiscent of a Vera chiffon.

“Vera was something that I grew up with,” says the artist. Vera’s design production began at the end of World War II: the scarves, first produced from surplus parachute silk, were later joined by linens, dinnerware, and clothing. “This was my introduction to contemporary art,” White reflects. “When you’re a kid and you sleep on sheets that look like a Frank Stella painting and then you go to a museum and see an actual Stella, you have a different type of gestalt. You might have a deeper relationship to the painting but you don’t understand why.” Growing up in Pasadena, California, in the 1970s, White was immersed in a Vera culture that extended from her bedsheets to the neighborhood moms’ patterned pantsuits. Vera eventually produced about 500 designs a year; Marcel Breuer designed its showrooms and Marilyn Monroe, in Bert Stern’s famous photographs, performed a dance of the seven veils with a Vera scarf.

“As a kid, I was always intrigued by Vera because her name was everywhere but I didn’t know her last name,” notes White, plucking a 1970s polyester square from the diaphanous heap on the floor. The square, printed with red poppies in a Pop art style, is signed “Vera”—a jazzy half-cursive autograph with the company’s ladybug logo. The earliest Vera scarves, White points out, included subtle repeat patterns. “There might be a pattern of stars and then a little star charm hanging from the corner,” says White. “Which I love—it’s like the pattern left the plane of the scarf and moved into the three-dimensional world.”

White admits that although she’s pieced together Vera’s story over the years, she prefers to remain unencumbered by too many facts. “Vera was from Germany,” recalls White, perhaps imagining some Bauhaus connection. According to most sources, however, including the Smithsonian Institution, Vera was born to a Russian-Jewish family in Connecticut in 1907. But it’s the thousands of patterns that Vera created that White considers important; they’re proof that everything has the potential to be realized as design. “I would look at the scarves and tell their stories to myself,” remembers White. “Here’s a scarf about visiting the Riviera; here’s one with a plate of seafood.”