Thanks to geopolitics and mail-order catalogs, previously obscure ethnic designs and textiles are now being cycled through American clothing and home fashions, says UC Davis environmental design professor Victoria Rivers.

Rivers points to catalogs featuring high-quality, expensive textiles that would have been scarce a decade ago. She says the designers are creating multicultural items such as alpaca wool garments from the Andes knitted with Central Asian patterns or metallic-embroidered table cloths in Persian and Indian designs.

She has also seen curtain panels, cushion covers and garments with central Asian motifs, such as pomegranates and floral/solar circles used in dowry embroideries from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Those countries' designs have been only broadly exported since the breakup of the Soviet Union a dozen years ago.

Designers are reproducing multicultural motifs but using simpler, less costly, manufacturing techniques. For instance, fabric with blurry-edge designs similar to Indonesian ikat is now popular. But the cloth is produced more cheaply than using the traditional patterning process in which threads are tied and dyed before being woven.

The increase of ethnic design options is helping houseware designers, who now design for several seasons a year and are always looking for fresh ideas, Rivers says. As a result, consumers have many more choices.

"Exposure to fashion was customarily through fashion magazines and shopping, where one would see what the buyers had brought in," Rivers says. "But with mail-order catalogs, people are able to see a wider range of styles and select something that speaks to them."