Outsourcing Authenticity: Factory-Made Quilts and the Question of Ethnicity

One outgrowth of the late twentieth-century quilt revival was a booming trade in antique quilts and a subsequent consumer market for new quilts. As prices rose for both antique quilts and for new quilts made by American quiltmakers in cottage industries, textile manufacturers identified a new potential market: quilts based on historic American patterns, with low price points due to Chinese factory production.  In the late 1980s and early 1990s these businesses flourished; American consumers bought millions of foreign factory-made quilts from mail order catalogues and department stores.  The American Folk Art Museum licensed some of its historic quilts, including an iconic Amish design, to be made overseas. And most controversially, the Smithsonian Institution contracted with the largest offshore manufacturer of quilts to reproduce several of its most-loved quilts, including the Harriet Powers Bible Quilt and one featuring the Great Seal of the United States. Many consumers loved the ability to buy what they understood as traditional American quilts in “authentic” designs for several hundred dollars, rather than for thousands. But despite the booming sales for these reproduction quilts, many quilt enthusiasts protested the Smithsonian’s decision, in part, because they worried these offshore reproductions would devalue all American quilts. They also expressed concern that future generations may not identify these quilts as Chinese factory-made knock-offs, but mistake them for authentic, historic American quilts. A key aspect of the protest was the Chinese ethnicity of the workers hand stitching these so-called American quilts. As Ohio Congressman Ralph Regula asked: “How can the Chinese reproduce an American quilt? The answer is they cannot and should not?”  By examining the outsourcing of American quilts, this paper explores paradoxes of ethnicity and authenticity embedded in what we think of as one of the most American of symbols: the quilt.