NYC Artists Making Silk Scarves: A Field Guide
Share
New York has always been a fashion city, but the more interesting story right now is happening in the studios—not the showrooms. A growing number of NYC-based artists are working in textiles, turning photography, illustration, and archival imagery into pieces you wear rather than hang. It's not fashion design in the traditional sense. There's no seasonal collection, no runway, no wholesale to department stores. It's artists using silk, cotton, and paper as their medium, producing in made to order, and selling directly to the people who appreciate the work.
Our studio is one of them. Paul Morris designs every scarf and print from a West Village space, pulling from sources that range from the Smithsonian archives to a walk through Red Hook. But we're not alone in this lane—and the more people discover the work being done by independent textile artists in this city, the better it is for all of us. Here's a field guide.
What "made by an artist" actually means
The phrase "silk scarves" gets used to describe everything from a printed t-shirt to a Swarovski-encrusted Versace gown, which is to say it can mean almost anything. The version we mean is narrower: an object that's made by an artist, to order, in editions of 100, with the same intent they'd bring to a gallery piece—but which happens to be functional.
That narrow definition rules out most contemporary fashion. A Loewe dress isn't silk scarves; it's a very expensive dress designed by a designer. A Warhol print on a silk scarf—if Warhol signed off on the edition—qualifies, because the intent and authorship are rooted in the art practice, not the commercial fashion calendar. The distinction is practical, not snobbish. It changes how the object is made, priced, and collected.
The NYC textile scene right now
New York's current textile-art scene is concentrated in Brooklyn (Gowanus, Red Hook, Bushwick) and downtown Manhattan (West Village, Chinatown). The studios are typically small—one to three people—and the work is usually sold directly through the artist's own website, via Instagram, or through a handful of gallery-affiliated boutiques.
Two institutional anchors give the scene shape. New York Textile Month runs an annual citywide series of exhibitions, studio visits, and talks every September, and is probably the best single way to plug into the community if you're new to the scene. The Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn runs a residency program and functions as a shared studio for many of the artists working independently in the space. Beyond those two, the scene runs mostly through Instagram and word-of-mouth—small enough that most artists know each other's work, large enough that it's genuinely diverse.
How we approach it at Leeloo + Zohan
Our process starts in an archive. For any new scarf design, Paul pulls a specific source—a 19th-century botanical plate from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a vintage hand-tinted NYC postcard from his collection, a photograph he took in Hawai'i or the Hudson Valley—and builds a new composition from it in the studio. The work is digital: Photoshop, Illustrator, color-managed print files that get sent to a digital silk printer.
From there, the physical object takes over. Each scarf is printed on 8-momme silk habotai, cut to three sizes (26", 36", 50"), and finished with a rolled hem. Edition of 100 per size. When the edition retires, we don't reissue.
This is craft narrative, not autobiography. What matters is the method: source → composition → print → object. Every studio we respect in this scene runs a version of that loop, just with different sources and different media. We're not unusual in our process; we're part of a pattern.
Studios and artists to know
A few NYC-based textile and wearable-art practices worth knowing if this category interests you. We've narrowed the list to studios that work specifically in scarves or printed silk, and whose work treats the medium as a made-to-order art object rather than seasonal product:
- Teascarf Brooklyn—Reed Slater, based in Brooklyn. Creates original artwork using steeped tea bags, then reproduces the patterns onto silk scarves and pillow covers. Working in this medium since 2012.
- Echo New York's Echo100 series—a made-to-order collaboration program: edition of 100s of 100 scarves by different artists each cycle, commissioned directly. Designers have included Emily Henry, Dorothy Lichtenstein, and Ngoc Minh Ngo.
- Jessie Zhao—NYC. Silk scarves on 100% mulberry silk with hand-drawn illustrations of natural-history imagery—flora, fauna, and imagined ecology.
- Wildcolor—Brooklyn. Natural-dye textile studio that upcycles discarded silks and cottons into new pieces. Adjacent to the scarf world rather than in it, but the sensibility is relevant.
Studios mentioned above were active as of 2026. Independent practices are not stable businesses—URLs rot, studios close, artists move—so verify before making a trip. If you're in NYC in September, New York Textile Month is the single best week to see most of this scene in person.
Why New York matters for this work
Three reasons, in the order they matter:
Proximity to museum collections. The Smithsonian, the Met, MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Morgan Library, the New York Public Library's Digital Collections, the New-York Historical Society—all within a subway ride. The imagery available to a New York-based textile artist in the public domain is extraordinary.
The city as source material. Architecture (Grand Central, Chrysler, Met, Woolworth), neighborhoods (Red Hook, West Village, Lower East Side), and the overlay of eras that happens in NYC more densely than anywhere else in the US. Our Vintage Postcards series wouldn't make sense in Atlanta; the layering of architectural eras that New York provides is specifically local.
Density of the collector and gallery audience. The people most likely to buy an independent-studio scarf—people who collect prints, follow galleries, attend studio visits—are concentrated here. That density creates a market for the work, which sustains the studios that make it.
How to buy from independent studios
Four practical tips if you're interested in supporting this work:
- Go direct. Buy from the artist's own website where possible. Marketplaces (Etsy, Amazon Handmade) take a cut that squeezes the artist's margin. Direct-to-consumer means more of the price reaches the person who made the thing.
- Understand the edition. Before buying, check what edition size the studio works in, whether editions retire, and whether pieces are numbered. The more specific the edition policy, the more serious the studio is about treating the work as collectible.
- Ask about process. Any serious textile artist should be able to walk you through where the source imagery came from, how the print files were prepared, what material the substrate is, and who handles the hem or finishing. If the answers are vague, the work is closer to licensed product than artist-made.
- Expect a wait. Made-to-order production means 5–14 days typically. That's not inefficiency—it's what "not warehouse inventory" means.
To see our current work: the Artist Series collection. For the artist bio and studio background: paulmorris. For wholesale or press inquiries, info@leeloozohan.com.
Read next
- Why silk scarves are the new art prints—the edition model, explained
- A brief history of the printed silk scarf—how the medium evolved
Work from our own studio: Vintage Postcards Series, NYC Silk Scarves, NYC Fine Art Prints.