During the decade before he emerged as "the world's most famous postwar artist" in the 1960s, Andy Warhol worked in the world of commercial design and advertising, said Giles Sutherland in The Times. His illustrations for magazines and retail clients are already well documented, but one aspect of his pre-fame career – his work as a textile designer – has until recently been overlooked.
Warhol "did not design clothing, nor was he a couturier"; he sold his patterns to manufacturers, "often anonymously". The printed fabrics, emblazoned with "repeated motifs" of "socks, ice-creams, hats, shoes and butterflies", would then be used to create all kinds of "colourful fashion items", from "petite dresses" to "underwear, blouses and swimwear".
This exhibition brings together more than 35 original examples of Warhol's textile work, and "convincingly" argues that his commercial designs "necessarily presaged his emergence into pop art". It is "impeccably presented, researched and curated". All in all, it's "difficult to fault".
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Warhol began working as a commercial designer shortly after arriving in New York from his native Pittsburgh in 1949, said Francesca Peacock in The Daily Telegraph. His textiles were soon being sold across the US, mainly through department store catalogues. Examples of his handiwork here demonstrate that he was already on the way to establishing his artistic signature.
Nothing, it seems, can escape "his delight in repetition": in mid-1950s textile patterns, he covers fabrics with everything from "apples to rulers"; on one 1956 pattern, printed onto "a dress with a quintessential mid-1950s silhouette", he draws socks in a bewildering variety of styles – "striped, argyle, polka-dot, and baby booties". The one complaint about this otherwise "joyful" show is its insistence that his textile designs were somehow more "pure" than his other commercial commissions. There is no getting around the truth: what we have here is simply "a collection of material, consumer objects".
"The clothes themselves feel very 1950s and Doris Day, prim and conservative," said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. When you see swatches of his fabrics on their own, however, "the unmistakable Warhol touch magics away the date and takes us somewhere timeless". His patterns are "light and airy", becoming ever "cheekier" and more absurdist as the show progresses: "birds and butterflies" on early pieces give way to "unlikely pieces of gardening equipment or weird types of writing implement"; everything is drawn with his "blotchy trademark line", usually against a white background.
There's humour, too. One cloth is "covered with pretend buttons", another with Manhattan pretzels; Warhol's "plebeian fondness for shopfront America" was not ironic. This show is a "delightful" exploration of "a lost bit of Warhol".
Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh (0131-550 3660, dovecotstudios.com). Until 18 May
