Patterning dyes onto fabric was a process carried out in ancient Greece, Rome and Byzantium, but the first real printing technique was almost certainly developed by the Chinese, who were printing on paper with carved wood blocks two Millenia ago. This, the oldest method of direct printing, has also been practised in India for centuries in the form of vividly colored and intricately patterned cottons, and was in use in medieval Europe as a minor textile craft.

From wood block printing in the late 18Th century came a method of printing from engraved copper plates, particularly for one color, scenic prints known as Toiles de Jouy. From this developed the first mechanized printing process, cylinder (or roller) printing, which was patented in 1783 and then revolutionised the Western textiles industry, speeding up production of thousands of meters per day.

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Screen printing is the youngest of all the direct printing methods, though it has a long and very distinguished ancestry in the form of stencilling, to which it is closely related. But while stencilling can be wonderfully intricate and highly effective, it has the disadvantage of always requiring “tiles” that link the cut out patterns together.

Screen printing was a refinement that no longer needs tiles, thanks to the fact that the print is made by the dye being pushed through a fine mesh held taught in a frame, with areas blocked out by paper stencils, varnish or photo chemicals. It was in 1850 at Lyons that the first recorded stencil prints were made that were supported all over by silk gauze – though it is entirely possible that this process had also been discovered in Japan long before.

In 1907 an Englishman took out a patent for a “tile-less stencil” and during the first world war, posters and banners were produced by screen printing. But it was not until the 1920s that European and American screen printing became a viable industry, and the term “serigraph” was coined, from the Latin Seri, meaning “silk”, and Greek Graphos, meaning to “draw or write”.

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For several decades,  screen printing remained a hand process, then in the 1950s the fully automated flat bed screen printer came into operation, followed soon after by the rotary printer, both of which have made possible the printing of huge runs of fabric and paper in sophisticated, detailed and precise patterns of many colors. But the artistry of the hand screen print remains undiminished, and evidence of its qualities can be seen not only in the work of the artists, including Andy Warhol, famous for his Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup prints, but also in the ground breaking designer fabrics produced by the European textile houses in the 1930s, 40s and early 50s. These colorful and creative fabrics epitomize all that is best about screen printing and show why it is still highly regarded today by artists, designers, crafts people and couture houses.