Vera Neumann

Vera Neumann was born in Stamford, Connecticut. With her husband George Neumann and their partner F. Werner Hamm she started a small printing business, and from 1947 its scarves carried a single name, Vera, printed with her own designs.

The signature is part of the design. In the early 1950s she added a ladybug beside it as a sign of good luck. The first scarves were printed on surplus parachute silk; later ones used polyester, cotton and rayon and silk blends.

From our shop

The green and white circles scarf we found in September 2026 is a rayon and silk blend with a Made in Japan label, from the late 1970s.

She died in 1993 in North Tarrytown, New York. Vera scarves and designs are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and Cooper Hewitt, and the Museum of Arts and Design gave her an exhibition, Vera Paints a Scarf, in 2019.