Strange but True

And I thought felt was just boiled, compressed wool.

Turns out there is far more food for thought – and product inspiration – in the “Fashioning Felt” exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum on New York’s Museum Mile.

The Cooper-Hewitt, a branch of the Smithsonian, has with this show assembled the works of traditional artisans, mold-breaking artists, architectural types, apparel, interior and furniture designers from around the world who have one thing in common. Their choice of material is felt.

Not just the stuff of insulated rustic boots and earflap winter caps. And not just felt from wool. This is a material that combines every stream of fiber technology available, and approaches to product design that range across the broadest spectrum of insight and daring.

On view are things from dreams. And hard-nosed engineering. And maybe things that, appropriately interpreted with merchandising in mind, could fire up more than one relatively humdrum home furnishings assortment in today’s market.

In Fashioning Felt there is not only upholstery, there are complete furniture sets made of felt. There are traditional and modular floor treatments, archaic-looking and supermod wallcoverings. There is even a charming, high-ceilinged corner room that seems to encapsulate you in the gauziest of canopies, sunlight gleaming in through what looks like the felt equivalent of velvet burnout designs.

Assistant curator Susan Brown, interviewed by the New York Times, noted that felt “is very comforting, warm and inviting,” and also said felt “has the softness you expect from a textile, but it can be handled and manipulated more like a plastic.”

Product ideas, anyone?

“It’s a little bit liberated from the constraints of other textiles,” the Times quoted Ms. Brown. “It’s a really wonderful, yet strange material.”

Inspiration, anyone?

At the corner of 91^st Street and Fifth Avenue, open seven days a week, Fashioning Felt will run through September 7. Well worth your hour.