Textile designer and trendsetter, Dorothy Liebes was born on October 14 - or maybe the 15th - in 1897. Her birth certificate reads October 15, but she celebrated on the 14th throughout her life. A clerical error may explain the discrepancy as the original document was lost in the 1906 earthquake. Liebes was born two months premature – a precarious start in the days before NICUs – and it was common not to name a baby whose viability was uncertain. The line for the name she wou

In her unpublished autobiography, Liebes interspersed memories of historic events of the early 20th Century with more intimate details of family life: the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, watching the spectacle of Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet steaming through the Golden Gate in 1908 (30 years before the iconic bridge was built); and riding to her grandparents’ ranch in the family’s bright red Rambler with its enormous whitewalled tires.  The Great White Fleet The Fami

Liebes assumed she would attend the University of California at Berkeley right after high school, but her father’s unsuccessful hops growing venture meant postponing her dream. The free tuition offered at San Jose Normal School (now San José State University) allowed Liebes to get a teaching certificate, an “anchor to windward,” as her parents called it. She became president of the senior class and active in several clubs. In 1918, Liebes got her first job as an 8th grade tea

A part time job at the Esther Hellman Settlement House on San Bruno Avenue in San Francisco took up three nights a week during Liebes’s last year at Berkeley. Her job was to “Americanize” recent Eastern European immigrants who accessed the house’s resources. Liebes took the trolley from campus to the Oakland terminal known as “The Mole," ferried across the bay to San Francisco, then hopped another trolley to the Club. The entire trip took an hour each way. The notorious Howar

With shorter hair, and an uncharacteristically serious look, it's hard to locate Liebes on her college yearbook page. She is in the second row, fifth from the left. Liebes expected to graduate from Berkeley as a painter, but her teacher, Ann Swainson, noticed “a curious quality” in her work: its resemblance to textiles. Swainson suggested Liebes try weaving and recommended she attend a summer  intensive at Hull-House in Chicago. Liebes could only afford two of the institute’s

Liebes’s salary from a second job at the Brooklyn Heights Academy for Girls, combined with $85 from the Horace Mann School, enabled her to take courses in embroidery, rug making and tapestry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She also “haunted the other museums,” such as Cooper Hewitt, the Museum of Natural History, and the South American Wing of the Brooklyn Museum. And she had a typically active social calendar for a young woman in her early 20s. Late into the night, she wo

Liebes’s first marriage to a wealthy merchant fulfilled her plan to “marry a millionaire so I can do what I want.” She met Leon Liebes, president of San Francisco’s H. Liebes & Company, while he was on a buying trip to New York, and they engaged in a brief bicoastal courtship. Dorothy found Liebes erudite, worldly and handsome, and no doubt saw a way out of selling her handwoven pram blankets. Dorothy became Mrs. Leon Liebes in 1928 and returned to her beloved California to b

When the organizers of the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition offered Dorothy the directorship of the Decorative Arts Pavilion, Leon advised that she not take on this enormous task. He was concerned about the toll it would take on her health. He also wanted her to move home from the Fairmont. Dorothy opted instead to step into the spotlight on Treasure Island. She traversed the United States and Europe in the summer of 1938, collecting textiles, books, metalworks, scul

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Liebes was asked by the Red Cross to help wounded veterans returning from World War II. Soon appointed National Art Director, she “went flea-hopping all over the country, conferring with the heads of hospitals, recruiting artists and craftsmen, and appealing for equipment.”  Twenty-eight different arts and skills were taught in over 130 hospitals across the nation. “My special interest, of course, was in weaving,” she wrote.  “Sma

Liebes wrote to her friend, the ceramicist Beatrice Wood, that “I don’t much like Los Angeles to begin with.” But in the 1940s and ‘50s, Los Angeles very much liked her. William Haines and Frances Elkins used Liebes textiles in many of their commissions for Hollywood moguls and stars. Edward G. Robinson, Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper, Jack Warner, and George Cukor were among them. Liebes textiles were used in films including Lover Come Back, Adam’s Rib, and East Side, West Side,

Handweaving didn’t pay the bills. Liebes saw the potential in power looms to accomplish dual purposes: reduce overhead, thereby making her beautiful designs affordable for the average homeowner. In 1954, the British furniture designer T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings congratulated Liebes on her evolution from being “queen of the loom” to “empress of the power loom.” He may have been referring to her contributions to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Model Usonian House & Pavilion  at the Guggenhei

May Gunn, Liebes, and Louise Fong at the loom. More than her bold experiments with color, her civic mindedness, and her embrace of modernism, Dorothy Liebes’s legacy is most obvious in the people she mentored. Liebes’s studios were collaborative, iterative spaces that encouraged imagination and experimentation. Not threatened by the talents of others, scores of designers, weavers, and other artists spent time in her studios, and Liebes championed diversity, equity and inclusi

Dorothy Wright Liebes died of heart failure on September 20, 1972 in New York at the age of 74. Her estate was administered by her husband Pat Morin and her longtime studio manager Ralph Higbee, who kept the business going  for about 18 months after Liebes’s death. Higbee donated Liebes’s remaining work and samples to museums and universities across the country, ensuring that her textile legacy was accessible to the greatest number of people possible. Her 40,000 documents wer

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