About a pearl

I am having a bit of a Pearl Binder moment. Fantastic name. There is not a lot of information about her out there. A short, tantalising entry in Wikipedia opens up more questions than it answers. But there is nothing like poking about on the internet to find out more. I love to follow bizarre, occasionally rewarding links. You get a snapshot of who else is interested and often find another book to buy…

Binder was an interesting figure. She wrote and illustrated many books and was particularly obsessed with dress and folk arts, indeed all things decorative. She was well entrenched in the London commercial art circles. I love these mid-century artist / ethnographer types - Barbara Jones was another – as they had a beautiful, strangely naive yet socialist vision of Britain to espouse. They were part of the pre and post-war movement interested in design education in its widest sense and what, as they saw it, modern society lacked in terms of cultural and historical references for re-building its national visual identity. Between them they wrote and illustrated books on beautiful clothing, architectural history, follies, indigenous craft skills, furniture, interesting shops (yay!) and so on.

I love the fact that Binder’s illustrations re-interpret historical items, re-drawing them with artistic licence and, probably, inaccuracy. And I love her drawings, although she was not a great artist. At heart a curator, Binder was a cultural kleptomaniac. Piling up reference upon reference to things she found cool and then fitting them into the stories she wanted to tell. She lived in east London and obviously had a bit of a thing for London traditions, particularly the Pearly Kings and Queens (and who wouldn’t with her name?) whom she eventually wrote a book on in the 1970s. This illustration, though, is an early indication of her obsession, from a 1959 children’s ‘Look Book’ on clothes.