The Cooper Hewitt’s “Selects” series—in which the museum invites a celebrated aesthete to delve into its collection and curate a show—continues its winning streak with a constellation of objects chosen by the Nigerian-born British fashion designer Duro Olowu (on view through Aug. 28). Given his career, it comes as no surprise that Olowu emphasizes textiles (although not exclusively) with his signature mix of bold patterns, textures, and culturally specific motifs. Repetition emerges as a curatorial strategy. One striking arrangement, an array of printed cotton hanging in staggered layers, offers enough cross-cultural insights for an exhibition of its own. The juxtaposition of two mid-twentieth-century fabrics, one camouflage and the other Polynesian-themed, illuminates how the U.S. military presence in the South Pacific influenced American decorative trends. “Golden Harvest,” an expressively drawn orange textile design, from the late fifties, by the Trinidadian-British designer Althea McNish, provides a backdrop for a geometric seafoam-and-silver print, which was inspired by (and marketed to) Africa but produced in Manchester, England, in the early nineteen-hundreds. Elsewhere, an Afghan war rug, made by an unknown weaver circa 1990-2000, features images of grenades and helicopters, bluntly inscribing contemporary geopolitics into a centuries-old decorative form. And tassels exude unexpected charisma when a half-dozen knotted—and oddly biomorphic—Italian linen examples, from the seventeenth century, are installed below the fringe of a beautiful Mexican wool poncho, made two centuries later.