The things we take for granted today may, and often do, become artifacts of tomorrow. These swatches from a French notions shop for Parisian fabrics, were not intended as either art or artifact, yet together they transcend their function. In fact, they become snapshots of a time and place. Not only is the typography appealing, these simple quotidian frames for a wide variety of textile patterns for clothes and furniture, from the 1920s to the 1930s, are swatches of design ingenuity. Hypnotic in their beauty, can you take your eyes off of them? As Freud might have said, sometimes “a swatch is not a watch.”
