Draft:Andrea Aranow

Andrea Aranow (1945-2021) was an American fashion designer, anthropologist, and collector. Her fashion brand, Dakota Transit, existed between 1968 and 1973 in the East Village in New York City. Her style was characteristic of the counterculture of the time and her clothes were purchased by notable musicians, celebrities, and New York socialites. After closing down her store, Aranow travelled to Peru where she studied traditional textile practices and collected garments. She spent the next 15 years travelling around the world, spending a considerable amount of time in China and Japan. Aranow sold her collections to museums including the Met, the British Museum, and the Royal Scottish Museum. Upon returning to New York in 1987, Aranow opened Textile Documents, a business selling pieces from her collection to fashion designers. The business closed in 2009 and the collection of over 40,000 textiles is now owned by her son, Caleb Sayan, and operates as Textile Hive in Portland, Oregon.

Dakota Transit
Aranow was born in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1945 and developed an early interest in fashion. After graduating from Brown University with a B.A. in Cultural History, Aranow moved to New York in 1967 and shortly afterwards opened her store, Dakota Transit. The store was located at 333 East 9th Street in the East Village, near other well-known stores and concert venues including the Fillmore East. Dakota Transit became known for its use of leather, suede, feather and snakeskin in a patchwork style. Noteworthy clients include Miles and Betty Davis, Jimi Hendrix, and members of the band Mountain. Aranow gained recognition in the counterculture fashion scene as well as in the mainstream fashion press with coverage from a variety of outlets including Vogue, the East Village Other, and Rags.

Dakota Transit opened during a fruitful time in New York fashion. Other designers that were just starting their careers include Betsey Johnson, Stephen Burrows, and Sara Penn, who was a close friend of Aranow's. New York's economic situation was deteriorating at the beginning of the 1970's, neighborhoods all over the city were hit hard by economic recession causing crime rates to spike. The Dakota Transit store was not immune to this changing climate, and was robbed of around $13,000 of merchandise in 1971. Despite this, Aranow gave birth to her first son, Shadrach Todd, and opened a second location in Midtown.

Though the business was relatively successful, Aranow found the stresses of New York life, as well as the death of Jimi Hendrix, to be enough of a motivation to leave the city and embark on a new career path. Typically, the store would close during the summers to allow for Aranow and her staff to travel. In the summer of 1972, Aranow visited Peru and became interested in indigenous textile practices there. The following year, she decided to close the shop and began the next phase of her career.

Peru
Aranow began her time in Peru in the northern departments of Huancavelica and Junin where she worked for the Instituto Nacional de Cultura. Her work was mainly to study, interview, and write about artisan textile producers. While there, she also began collecting garments; mostly mantas and fiesta embroideries. From 1973 to 1981, Aranow made frequent trips between Peru and New York, where she received research counseling from anthropologist, Junius Bird. In 1977, while on an extended visit back to New York, Aranow gave birth to her second son, Caleb Sayan.

Throughout her time in Peru, Aranow collected over 400 garments, many of which she would sell to museums around the world but mainly the British Museum. Like in New York, Aranow experienced break-ins and a general increase in difficulty living in Peru. At the beginning of the 1980's, the guerilla Communist group, "Shining Path", began a campaign of violent actions against the state. By 1981, Aranow decided that the country was unsafe for her family and decided to move to London. She lived in the U.K. for two years, organizing and managing her Peruvian collection. Around this time, she began to consider traveling to East Asia in order to conduct more research on textile practices. After some shorter trips to Burma and Thailand, Aranow planned a longer trip to China to study ethnic minority textile practices.

China
After Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972, China began slowly opening up to Western tourists. Beginning with select business and academic invited guests, between 1977 and 1980 tourism in China doubled each year. Still, individual tourists mostly were allowed to visit major cities or cultural landmarks. Aranow was interested in studying textile practices of minority groups in the rural southwest and northwest regions of China, places in which few or no foreigners had ever been to. Aranow would travel on foot in order to reach some villages, as there were still heavy restrictions on where foreigners were allowed to travel.

Aranow brought along her two sons, spending in total over a year moving through China. They went as far north as Kashgar, a hub for the Uyghur ethnic group. They also spent considerable time in Hainan Dao which is populated largely with Li or Hlai people. While studying their textile practices, Aranow also collected textiles including aprons, baby carriers, and other garments. She would end up selling nearly 200 of these object to the British Museum alone.

Japan and Textile Documents
At the end of her journey in China in 1984, Aranow decided to move her family once again to Tokyo, Japan. Aranow was denied a research visa from the government and decided instead to conduct research independently, collecting swatches, kimonos, and visiting flea markets to purchase textile ephemera. Over three years in Japan, Aranow collected over 800 kimonos as well as roughly 1000 zuan prints and 500 katagami stencils. The zuan prints, designs which would be used for kimonos, were acquired from a manufacturer, a rare purchase as kimono manufacturers generally destroyed their designs in order to prevent them from being stolen.

After moving back to New York in 1987, Aranow continued to visit and collect from Japan once a year up until the year before her death in 2021. In New York, Aranow started her textile archive and design inspiration business, Textile Documents. While the initial collection was made up mostly of material from Japan, Aranow continued to collect textile samples and swatches from around the world. The textile design collection would end up containing over 40,000 textile samples from over 50 countries. Designers and companies who have used the collection include Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton, Dries van Noten, Uniqlo, and many others. Aranow closed the business in 2009 but continued to collect, consult for fashion brands, and share the research she conducted all over the world.

Legacy
After closing down the business, Aranow and her son, Caleb Sayan, moved the collection to Portland, Oregon, where it lives today as part of Textile Hive. Sayan began the project of digitizing the entire collection in order to create an online database of textiles, available to users as a subscription service. In the final years of her life, Aranow was still active in developing and sharing her collection and research. She gave various talks at institutions such as Portland State University, Jefferson University, The Portland Adidas campus, and the Museum of the City of New York, where she participated in a panel with designer, Anna Sui. . She also participated in shows including the Illuscious fashion show hosted by the Ace Hotel in New York.

Aranow passed away in 2021 after a battle with cancer. Sayan continued to develop the Textile Hive collection, incorporating Aranow's material cultures collections, as well as photos, documents, and other materials collected by Aranow throughout her lifetime. In addition to making the collection more accessible, Sayan started Portland Textile Month, a yearly festival celebrating the textile arts. In 2024, Textile Hive will put on a series of exhibits showcasing the collection and Aranow's career.