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Headscarf

Headscarf

Headscarf

1965

Wool
Liberty of London, printed bottom left corner

This headscarf was designed in 1965 and printed at Liberty’s Merton Printworks in South London. No designer’s name is recorded in the company’s textile archive; with a few exceptions it was Liberty’s policy to emphasise the company’s name over that of the designer.

The scarf was produced at a time of great popularity for the Liberty headsquare, when a day’s shopping in town would often include a visit to the shop’s scarf and fabric departments. Its sophisticated colour palette, ranging through blues and greens on a dark navy ground, is characteristic of the period.

Liberty’s textile designs were given names that were sometimes simple and self-evident, and sometimes had historical, classical or geographical allusions. The choice of the rather erudite name of this scarf’s design, ‘Charybdis’, is intriguing: Charybdis being a giant whirlpool in a narrow sea channel , past which Odysseus had to sail in Homer’s epic Odyssey, and seems to have no apparent bearing on these images of lush vegetation.