Pattern and Palette in Print: Gentry Magazine and a New Generation of Trendsetters

A collaboration with undergraduate fabric-design students at UGA’s Lamar Dodd School of Art, this exhibition took as its inspiration Gentry magazine, a 1950s men’s lifestyle magazine that successfully captured nearly a decade of trends in menswear, with special emphasis on textiles and color. As part of a lesson in color forecasting and its significance to fabric design, students were asked to find inspiration in the pages of Gentry and in other 1950s-era media for creating a relevant master color palette, which they applied to patterns of their own design, inspired by imagery and themes in the magazine.

The exhibition consisted of all 22 Gentry magazine covers, the students’ patterns, a small selection of period menswear and gift items for women frequently advertised in the magazine and objects from the Color Association of the United States, including a book of original color forecasts for 1949 – 1954. It also featured interior pages of both Gentry and American Fabrics magazines to illustrate the students’ sources of inspiration as well as period color trends.