Andrea Aranow (1945-2021) created fashion and studied textiles starting in the late 1960’s, receiving a degree in cultural history from Brown University in 1967. She then went to New York City to open Dakota Transit, a custom leather and snakeskin apparel shop in the East Village. Dakota Transit’s innovative custom pieces made the shop a music scene hotspot and attracted clients such as Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix.
In 1973 Aranow left New York to live in the mountains of Peru for five years, where she began collecting pieces for her textile library of living cultures. From Peru, Aranow relocated her family to London, where the British Museum took interest in a 400-piece part of the collection she had compiled in South America. In 1983, Aranow began traveling Asia, spending years in outlying districts of China and Japan. Andrea’s full story, including her lifetime biography, can be found here.