St. Gallen textile museum, Textile museum in St. Gallen, Switzerland
The St. Gallen textile museum occupies the "Palazzo Rosso", a red-brick building erected in 1886 on the former Seidenhof site on Vadianstrasse in the old town. It houses textile collections and the textile library, which keeps thousands of pattern books with over two million originals documenting machine embroidery of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The museum was founded in 1878 when St. Gallen was becoming a major textile production center in Europe. The city was then among the most important places for fabrics and cloth on the continent.
The museum's name changed in 1982 from Industrie- und Gewerbemuseum to Textilmuseum. Its exhibitions place textiles in art-historical, social and economic contexts, such as the 2018/2019 show on costumes from 100 years of Circus Knie and the 2024 exhibition on fake food printed on fabric.
The museum and textile library occupy the Palazzo Rosso on Vadianstrasse in St. Gallen's old town, on the site of the former Seidenhof. The library's reading room holds thousands of pattern books and can be consulted on site, with some material available for loan. The building was extended upward in 1956 and its facade painted grey in 1962.
The textile library holds over two million original pattern books and designs, documenting machine embroidery of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the peak of St. Gallen's embroidery industry. Fabric printing and weaving are also represented, alongside fashion photographs and nature studies.
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