1970–1978 :: Tents & Beadwork
In 1970 Ira partnered with Angelo Donghia to redesign Pakistani wedding tents for western urban dwellers. Ira set himself up in Lahore to manufacture the tents with local tentmakers, who specialized in the Gulgari style of boldly patterned, hand appliqued tents. The room-sized tents, sold in Bloomingdale's and through Donghia's company, Vice Versa, allowed customers to transform an entire room into an exotic experience of color and pattern. The designs included richly canopied beds and a variety of accessories. The concept was so successful
the original hand appliqued versions were eventually reproduced on a larger scale in more affordable printed fabrics. In the Spring of 1974, Ira and Sylvia designed their own nomadic dwelling, a twelve-sided tent in which every other panel could open for ventilation. Working daily with a group of Kabul women, they pieced together brilliantly colored textile scraps found in the local bazaar into collages for each of the twelve doorways. The fabulous tent made its debut on a friend's land in Woodstock in the summer of 1974.