A friend and I were talking over the weekend about Gloria Vanderbilt's
patchwork bedroom photographed for Vogue in 1970. We remembered a general craze for quilts that swept across popular culture for the full length of that one decade before going underground again.
The so-called crazy quilts of the 19th century were less often imitated. Mostly-anonymous women pieced and embroidered these in irregular formats that did not lend themselves to later mass-production as readily as the more regular patchwork patterns did.
