There was a point, not too long ago, when designer Esha Ahmed was running her textile business out of the trunk of her Volvo and her apartment in Queens, New York. But as her brand, Makrosha, grew from a side hustle into an in-demand source for top interior designers, it was clear she needed to level up.

So when the opportunity to lease a space in a Gilded Age building on the southwest corner of Union Square in 2022, Ahmed leapt at the opportunity. Makrosha only continued to grow, evolving from a core group of fabrics to a full spectrum of textiles, accessories and rugs.

Makrosha comes from the Bangla word for spider, a reflection of Ahmed’s Bangladeshi heritage and her propensity to weave history and narratives into her vivid fabrics. It’s a sensibility that’s been years in the making, starting with when she was a little girl visiting sari shops with her mom, and continuing through stints at the Costume Institute, Peter Marino’s studio, and graduate school at FIT. Pick up any Makrosha fabric and you’ll find inspiration as varied as 17th-century French silk, Art Nouveau, flowers scattered across a Yorkshire moor and her mother’s closet.

Compared to her joyous fabrics – with names like Whirly Girly and Goosey Gold – her small showroom left something to be desired, in both style and square footage. ‘Any time a client came, we’d go into panic mode because we had fabric swatches everywhere,’ Ahmed jokes. Luckily, a studio next door became available, so Ahmed opted to expand into that space and tap her friend, interior designer Tara McCauley, to create something that felt uniquely hers. ‘I wanted it to feel discovered,’ Ahmed says.

As with her fabrics, Ahmed and McCauley looked to the past in designing the space, specifically an elegant 19th-century atelier. Guests step into a cosy vestibule, cloaked in Makrosha’s Meena fabric, an opulent stripe woven in India. The space also features a vintage Murano chandelier and an antique wood cabinet, displaying Makrosha pillows and throws. ‘The aesthetic is rooted in history,’ Ahmed explains.

Visitors are then ushered into a light-filled room where they can browse Makrosha’s fabric collection, displayed on gold metal rods against walls painted in a soft lilac limewash. ‘This colour shows up in the collection a lot – it’s not neutral but it’s not going to fight with what we’re showing,’ McCauley explains.

‘I am always drawn to Aesthetic Movement colours, where it’s muddy with a neon pop,’ Ahmed adds.

From there, visitors enter the atelier’s heart, a cosy double-height room, painted in a darker shade of lilac, that hosts client meetings and creative sessions. With its antique furniture, including a towering 1890s cabinet, and lively mix of patterns and colours emanating from soft furnishings, fabric samples and a mauve floral rug underfoot, the space feels like entering a secret wunderkammer that floats above Union Square.

There are more spaces to discover, like an upper-level nook atop a set of carpeted stairs, where customers can catch up on email or relax; or a sample room downstairs, where Ahmed’s three-person staff works. Unlike the soft-coloured walls upstairs, this space is clad in a softly-gleaming metallic wallpaper, ‘Andy Warhol’s Factory was a few doors up the street, but silver walls felt a bit too on the nose,’ McCauley explains. ‘This wallcovering with the woven overlay tells that story in a more relevant way.’

An antique wall hanging from the 1920s depicting the ruins of ancient Carthage adds a touch of more distant history.

The new showroom marks an important moment in Ahmed’s business; the opening coincides with the launch of a new made-to-order rug collection, called Shinki and inspired by the East-meets-West aesthetics of early 20th-century Japan. The designer’s also developing a collection of solids (‘because you can’t have flowers on everything’ she jokes) and continuing to deepen her relationships with weavers in Italy, Scotland, Nepal and upstate New York.

But for Ahmed, it marks something more personal: ‘I had never seen my fabrics all hung up together because I never had space to show the full collection,’ she says. ‘It made me a little emotional!’

Makrosha is located at 1 Union Square W, New York, NY 10003. Visits are available by appointment.

Just a 14-minute water taxi from the chaos of Venice Biennale’s epicentre, 27-year-old designer Chiara Angelica Gandini is finalising the launch exhibition for her fashion-label-cum studio, Haus Nuller. Clad in a crimson Issey Miyake plissé dress and fishnet flats, the Central Saint Martins-educated textile designer is tall with slicked back hair and an Italian lilt that reveals her Brescian upbringing. We’re stood inside the shell of a classic Venetian building, her family’s home in the quieter locale of Dorsoduro, which has been repurposed for the occasion.

Spread across palazzo-style rooms, her signature textiles – woollens hand-woven with stainless steel chains – are displayed at various stages in the painstaking design process, spanning digital patterns (each pixel corresponds to one thread) through to double-loom swatches framed as singular artworks. Design duo Formafantasma have curated the layout as a pared-back series of plinths, LED lighting and partitions tiled with the studio’s inaugural campaign, art directed by Stefanie Barth.

‘Haus Nuller: Breaking the Chain’ at the Venice Biennale

Entitled ‘Breaking the Chain’, the collection in question is a tight capsule of long coats, dresses, separates and capes – distressed just so on the outside. Gandini pores over a clothes rail, gesturing as she weighs up why a satellite event during the most prestigious art expo of the year was the right place and the right time to share her work – and not, say, fashion week. ‘Venice, it’s very interesting,’ she says, smiling. ‘The engineering of the city is super complicated, but it's also very fragile, right? I saw a connection with my practice.’ An assistant models one of the made-to-order designs, deliberately revealing its underside where the sparkling threadwork appears like a lining.

A longstanding interior design buff and Anni Albers fanatic – Gandini also calls out Yohji Yamamoto and anyone ‘that creates their own system when there wasn’t one that fit’ – takes visible joy in demonstrating the technical process behind her work, prompting me with snapshots from her phone. She takes me to another room to watch a process video. The footage shows merino and alpaca wool threads spread on the loom while a weaver’s hand applies metal chains across the weft. ‘It takes a while,’ she laughs. The weavers (all women, Gandini notes) behind the handiwork are spread across Europe: Barcelona, Prato, the UK and Finland. ‘We did a lot of research to find these machines and these women. It takes a lot of skill to weave something like that. You can’t just have a junior weaver.’

For Gandini, it’s worth the wait. After trialling various formulas over a two-year period for her knitwear – itself a feat at the intersection of mathematics and art – she landed on the golden ratio for her crack team. In fact, many weavers she trialled refused to work on the concept for fear of destroying their machines. There’s also issues that come with the crafty territory. Each weaver’s work comes out differently. ‘Everyone has a different hand,’ she says. ‘The weavers now know – after doing it and doing it – how much tension to apply, but if one day one of them is a bit tired, it’s going to come out wrong, and she has to start from scratch.’

The pieces – hand-wrought and one-of-a-kind – reflect the weaving process. Hold them in one hand, and they’re heavy; but wear them, and they’re effortless. ‘I like the idea of this weight, because it's making a political statement, in a certain sense, regarding gender,’ says Gandini, whose studio has intentionally blended a traditionally masculine industry (metalwork) with a historically undervalued and feminised one (textiles). Indeed, the name itself is a play on the Bauhaus movement and the German word, nuller, which translates to ‘of little value’.

The thinking first came to Gandini while in her studies when she clocked that CSM’s weaving studio was only used by women. ‘I started to study the history of textiles, and I noticed that even at the Bauhaus, even though women could finally enroll, they were confined to the weaving studio,’ says Gandini. ‘Threads were considered easier to work with, and women are [stereotypically considered] more gentle, so they can only work with things that are softer, you know – all that kind of narrative.’

Haus Nuller is a sincere and thoughtful proposition, both for the fashion market and a more textile-led one, artfully reevaluating craft in a way that doesn’t rush to quick-buck demands. It’s also more than just a clothing label, open to a wide spectrum of opportunities. Recently, the studio worked as the upholstery consultant for B&B Italia’s contemporary re-edition of the 1958 ‘Catilina’ chair by Luigi Caccia Dominioni.

‘For me, Dominioni’s architecture is really line-based,’ she says. ‘It made me think of an artist called Willem Cole, who works only with lines and the three primary colours.’ Cole produced a series of drawings, and Gandini translated them into textiles. ‘You know, I don’t only love fashion,’ she says. ‘But I do think fashion is more fun. Upholstery has a lot of rules.’

Of course, rules – including the one to not incorporate metalwork into weaving – have sown the seeds of this potentially game-changing studio practice. For now, the plan is to only produce one collection per year while consulting and working on special projects. ‘I don't think we need more clothes,’ says Gandini. ‘But we do need more ideas.’

Haus Nuller, ‘Breaking the Chain’, Sestiere Dorsoduro 3907 30123, Venezia, Italy.

The collection will be available for viewings and purchase at Via Ludovica Settala 45, Milano 20124 on 20-21 May, 2026.

Also read: What to see at the Venice Biennale

In contrast to the excessive noise that so often defines Milan Design Week, silence shapes Rubelli’s project, which presents an immersive installation in its showroom of the Venetian family-run company of luxury fabrics in Via Fatebenefratelli, created in collaboration with artist and activist Ai Weiwei.

‘Our first encounter dates back to an edition of the Venice Biennale,’ says Rubelli CEO Nicolò Favaretto Rubelli. ‘But it was only last October, when we began thinking about this year’s Design Week, that we reconnected. It was no random choice: he is a figure who has endured immense hardship – I have his most recent autobiography, published not long ago. Exile, humiliation, activism, imprisonment: above all, his mission is to communicate his message.’ Art and design have always been part of Rubelli’s DNA, the CEO adds, citing past collaborations with Paola Navone, Luke Edward Hall and Peter Marino, among others.

The title of Ai Weiwei and Rubelli’s exhibition, ‘About Silk’, is no coincidence: it marks the first time the artist has worked with this material. ‘Silk, one of humanity’s oldest materials, transcends the realm of imagination and lies beyond the scope of ordinary craftsmanship,’ says Ai Weiwei.

‘It is fascinating to me. I am a collector of ancient silks, some of which are over 3,000 years old. Each dynasty’s silk reflects different styles, but they all come from the delicate work of silkworms, making silk as a material both delicate and precious. When creating this artwork, my primary challenge was using silk as a medium to express long-standing themes such as human rights, freedom of speech, and the censorship system. Throughout this process, there were many discussions with Rubelli’.

The first room of the exhibit resembles a fully enclosed box, shielded from street light, where visitors are immersed in an intricate silk lampas. The composition radiates outwards from a central point like a burst of fireworks, with the regularity of a classical, almost Baroque drawing. On closer inspection, a dense weave of symbols emerges, tracing the artist’s history and struggles: surveillance cameras, handcuffs and chains, llamas (for Weiwei, a symbol of freedom and resistance to internet censorship in China), and the Twitter bird – from a time when it still represented digital freedom of expression. The reference is clearly Ai Weiwei’s original design, ‘The Animal that Looks like a Llama but is Actually an Alpaca’.

The warp of the fabric consists of 9,600 silk threads, equally divided between deep red and golden yellow. ‘The inspiration comes from a vase I bought 15-20 years ago in Beijing,’ Rubelli explains, describing a surface created through the interplay of intertwined threads, producing an iridescent effect reminiscent of Chinese ceramics, where colour is never uniform but vibrates with tonal variation. Metallic wefts enhance brilliance and shading, while the combination of five wefts and three shades of gold creates unexpected depth.

At the centre of the room stands a sculptural sofa upholstered in the same elaborate silk lampas. Its geometric backrest reveals subtle variations in depth, creating converging lines that distort perception. ‘Ai Weiwei had dreamed of making a sofa,’ says Rubelli. ‘When we met, he took a block and sketched it out. At first, I did not understand his idea of one part narrowing while another widens. The result is intriguing – more an art object than a sofa.’

The installation continues in a second room dedicated to ‘Finger’, one of the artist’s most recognisable motifs, inviting viewers to ‘raise our middle finger’ against sites of power and censorship. It also serves as a backdrop for two display cases designed by Formafantasma, containing textile documents from the Rubelli Historical Archive and the Rubelli Foundation, highlighting the millenary textile dialogue between Weiwei’s China and Rubelli’s Venice.

On the lower floor, the artist speaks through a black-and-white visual narrative, his voice calm and reflective. The documentary film, created for the occasion by Argentine director Felipe Sanguinetti and filmed between Downing College, Cambridge, and the Rubelli weaving mill in Como, captures the exchanges, sketches and experiments behind the project.

‘In the course of so-called social progress, we have increasingly lost our connection to nature and the inspiration it provides, much of which has been supplanted by new technologies,’ Ai Weiwei explains. ‘Similarly, a lot of modern technology has distanced itself from political, social, and historical discourse. In an era dominated by AI and algorithms, we see a growing narrative of technological control that continuously erases or obscures human nature and craftsmanship. This shift diminishes tactile experiences and emotions on a large scale, which I believe poses a threat to human nature and to historical memory. That is why, in my collaboration with Rubelli, I sought to develop a new approach using silk, a medium that could embody both functionality and complexity.’

Rubelli agrees: ‘We are a Venetian family company working with silk and precious textiles. I’m very glad that, through our work, we can help spread Ai Weiwei’s reflections and message.’

Follow all the latest news from Milan Design Week 2026 with our editors’ live blog.

Textile designer, weaver, writer and graphic artist, Anni Albers (1899-1994) was a pioneer of 20th-century modernism. Her work prompted a reconsideration of textiles as an art form – both in their functional roles and as wall hangings – and pushed the processes of printmaking into new territory. Like many of the 20th century’s most influential female designers, her work long existed in the shadow of her husband, the painter and colour theorist Josef Albers, but in recent years has come into sharper focus.

That renewed attention is reflected in the publication of her first major biography, written by cultural historian Nicholas Fox Weber, who knew the Alberses personally and has served as executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation for four decades. Drawing on extensive archival research and decades of personal contact, the book revisits Albers’ life and work, tracing how a material long associated with function became a vehicle for some of the 20th century’s most rigorous artistic thinking.

Rethinking weaving

Born Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann in Berlin in 1899, Albers grew up in a cultured and affluent household. Her father ran a successful furniture business, while her maternal grandfather founded Ullstein Verlag, then one of Europe’s largest publishing houses. Even as a teenager, Fox Weber notes, she was 'more curious and adventurous than most people…open to rebellion, to confronting the unexpected, and to living originally.'

She arrived at the Bauhaus in 1922, part of a generation seeking new forms of expression in the unsettled years following the First World War. Like many women at the school, she was directed towards the weaving workshop. What followed was less an acceptance of constraint than a redefinition of it. Working with cotton, linen and jute, as well as metallic threads and horsehair, she approached weaving as a system – one grounded in logic, repetition and variation.

Her compositions, built from repeated lines and subtle shifts in tone, rejected representation in favour of abstraction, yet retained a physical immediacy. These were objects to be handled as much as seen. In doing so, Albers helped collapse the boundary between art and design, positioning textiles as a site of experimentation rather than decoration.

From the Bauhaus to Black Mountain

In 1925, she married Josef Albers, whom she had met at the Bauhaus. When the school closed under pressure from the Nazi regime in 1933 – faced with demands to abandon what it deemed 'degenerate' art – the pair were left without work. As conditions in Germany became increasingly precarious, particularly for Anni as a Jewish artist, an opportunity emerged through Philip Johnson, whom she had met during his visit to the Bauhaus. After a chance meeting in Berlin, Johnson returned to the United States and soon sent a telegram inviting the couple to join the newly established Black Mountain College in North Carolina. They arrived in New York in November 1933.

The move marked a dramatic shift in circumstances. Having lived comfortably in Berlin, the couple found themselves in modest conditions, supported by the college with accommodation and meals. Yet the environment proved formative. At Black Mountain, where they remained until 1949, Albers developed both her practice and her pedagogy. Her philosophy – grounded in clarity, discipline and responsiveness to material – was later set out in her book On Weaving (1965) and would go on to shape a generation of artists; later figures such as Sheila Hicks and Ruth Asawa have cited her as an influence.

Expanding the field

Albers’ circle extended across disciplines – from John Cage to Buckminster Fuller, as well as Bauhaus figures including Walter Gropius and Paul Klee – reflecting the cross-pollination that defined midcentury modernism. Her work drew on observation as much as theory, from Berlin interiors to the textures and colours of Mexico, which became a lasting influence.

During her time at Black Mountain, she also developed an experimental series of ‘hardware’ jewellery with student Alex Reed, using utilitarian materials such as paper clips, screws and sink fittings. Created in part in response to the loss of her family’s possessions during exile – her parents fled Germany in 1939 with little to their name, their jewellery either confiscated by Nazis or used to secure safe passage – the pieces challenged conventional notions of value and ornament. Though initially met with scepticism, they embodied a principle that ran through her wider practice: that meaning lies not in material worth, but in invention and perception.

In the transcript from a talk she gave to students in March 1942, she wrote: ‘To our surprise we found that though we used such common materials as bobby-pins or washers or stopper chains for our necklaces, they sometimes looked quite beautiful and even precious. To our greater surprise still, we found that other people liked them too. But our greatest surprise was that others, like ourselves, did not care about the value or lack of value of the materials we used, but enjoyed, instead of material value, that of surprise and inventiveness – a spiritual value.’

Her designs are now held in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which played a pivotal role in her recognition. In 1945, the museum staged a small exhibition of modern textiles that included her work. Though modest in scale, it marked an important moment, signalling the growing significance of textiles within modern art. Four years later, in 1949, Albers was given a landmark solo exhibition – the institution’s first dedicated show for a textile artist, and only the second afforded to a woman.

Conceived with Philip Johnson and initiated by Edgar Kaufmann Jr, the exhibition presented woven works, room dividers and material studies that prioritised structure, tactility and invention over decoration. Installed with unusual clarity – floating furniture, suspended screens and rhythmic partitions – it emphasised the inherent qualities of materials, from raffia and cellophane to metal threads. A review in The New York Times described her as 'a fabric engineer', underscoring her position as both artist and innovator. Though understated at the time, the exhibition marked a turning point, helping to establish textiles as a serious medium within modern art.

New Haven and beyond

In 1950, Anni and Josef Albers moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Josef took up a teaching position at Yale University, becoming chair of the Department of Design. The move marked a shift from the experimental environment of Black Mountain College to a more established academic setting, while providing a stable base from which both could develop their work.

For Anni, this was a period of increasing independence. Her reputation continued to grow through the 1950s, with exhibitions across the United States, including a major touring show organised by MIT. At the same time, she expanded her practice beyond weaving, turning to printmaking in the early 1960s.

Her prints translated the logic of weaving into a new medium. Working across lithography, screenprinting and embossing, she developed compositions built from repeated lines, grids and subtle tonal variation. As in her textiles, structure remained central: image emerged through process rather than gesture, reinforcing her position as an artist for whom material and method were inseparable.

Legacy

Anni and Josef Albers worked well into the 1970s, remaining restless and curious throughout their later years. After Josef died in 1976, Anni devoted her attention to the stewardship of his legacy as well as her own practice – continuing her printmaking with Gemini G.E.L. and overseeing exhibitions of her work.

She died in 1994, yet her influence has only grown more visible in recent years, as contemporary designers and artists return to questions of material, process and the value of making. Retrospectives at the Gugggenheim Bilbao in 2017 and Tate Modern in 2018 put her work firmly into the spotlight once more. Another show at Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas followed in 2024, while just last year, Dedar launched five fabrics based on Albers' weavings with showcases in Milan and New York. If modernism often privileged the monumental and the industrial, her work offers another perspective, one that starts with a simple thread and works outward.

'Anni Albers: A Life' is released in the US on 28 April 2026 and in the UK on 23 June 2026.

Shop Anni Albers

Have you ever stopped to admire the textiles upholstering the seats of the London Underground? The moquette fabric that covers them has become almost as iconic as the Transport for London roundel itself. Each line has its own motif, the most recognisable, perhaps, being Wallace Sewell’s 2010 ‘Barman’ design – a rhythmic composition that references city landmarks, reinterpreted in various constructions and colourways across the network.

TfL’s moquettes are more than hard-wearing seat coverings. They are visual and cultural signatures, instantly recognisable to riders and enthusiasts. These patterns have transcended the carriage interior, appearing in homewares and even fashion – a recent example is TfL’s ongoing collaboration with textile house Kirkby, whose third joint collection has just launched.

'Underground Vol. III' revisits eight archival moquette designs – used across the Underground and wider transport system from the 1910s – and transforms them into luxury upholstery velvets suitable for modern interiors. The collection experiments with scale, texture and trend-led colour palettes while preserving each pattern’s historic character.

Many of these designs trace their origins to the 1930s, when London Transport’s publicity officer, Christian Barman, commissioned leading artists and designers, including Marion Dorn, Enid Marx, Paul Nash and, later, Marianne Straub, to elevate transport interiors with bold, modern textiles. Their work transformed purely functional upholstery into a form of public art.

In Kirkby’s collection, ‘Chalfont’ revives a floral moquette once used in the first-class compartments of the Metropolitan Railway’s steam locomotives. Echoing the opulence of early rail travel, the design has been hand-drawn and woven as a two-tone cut-and-uncut velvet.

Elsewhere, ‘Brent’ is based on a 1936 design by Enid Marx, featuring a vibrant diamond motif that once upholstered District line carriages. Kirkby preserves its geometric precision while enhancing its depth and tactility through a cut-and-uncut velvet construction. ‘Caledonian’, inspired by a 1938 design by Marion Dorn for the Metropolitan line, reinterprets a classic tartan check, here simplified into a graphic, retro-inflected velvet. ‘Eden’ references a 1930s art deco-style houndstooth used on trams and trolleybuses – including the 601 route between Twickenham and Tolworth – refined into a smaller-scale, versatile velvet.

‘Bromley’ reimagines a 1960s stripe produced by Birr Fabrics for London Transport coaches as an all-velvet pile in contrasting tones. ‘Piccadilly’ draws on a 1994 geometric moquette introduced during refurbishment of 1970s Tube stock, its fragmented pattern reworked in cut and uncut velvet. ‘Northern’, which takes cues from a 1965 design by Marianne Straub once seen across multiple Underground lines and London’s double-decker buses, sees its interlocking geometric blocks enlarged to create a graphic statement. Finally, ‘Bakerloo’ translates a 1960s geometric moquette from refurbished Tube trains into a richly tactile, three-dimensional fabric.

Through thoughtful reinterpretation, 'Underground Vol. III' demonstrates how these historic moquettes continue to resonate – not only as nostalgic emblems, but as enduring examples of British textile innovation. In reweaving the past for contemporary spaces, Kirkby affirms that great design, even within settings as mundane as a morning commute, can leave a lasting impression.

kirkbydesign.com

Here's a new word to slip into casual conversation: qualia.

Qualia, derived from the Latin adjective quālis, are, in essence, the unique sensations that make up an experience — the feeling of a favourite sweater or the smell of your grandmother's perfume.

Even if you didn't get a degree in philosophy, it's easy to grasp how the evocative term became a source of inspiration for Zak + Fox, the New York-based textile company. In fact, Zak + Fox has devoted a collection of 14 new designs entirely to the concept.

'[The Qualia collection] is a story of how we viscerally understand things — where meaning is not fixed, but truly found in the eye of the beholder,' said company creative director and founder Zak Profera.

For the collection, Profera and his team looked to references as varied as midcentury modernism, the cosmos and desert hotels, revealing a collection that is as beautiful as it is enigmatic. Each design has a mysterious (and vaguely sci-fi-inspired) name — Umbra, a check with a subtle sheen; Syzygy, a print that evokes celestial energy; or Eclissi, a lively floral woven print. 'Some see beauty while others feel awe; some ruminate on the past while others awaken to the strangeness of being alive,' a project description hints.

To capture the mystic sensations — indeed qualia— that the fabrics induce, Zak + Fox tapped celebrated design photographer Stephen Kent Johnson to photograph the fabrics in and around what appears to be a forgotten midcentury hotel.

Vintage furnishings throughout are upholstered in Qualia fabrics. Gardenia, a whimsical, vintage-inspired floral, wraps a vintage tufted sofa that's been sealed away in a plastic cover. Laglinu, described by Zak + Fox as 'impish' swaddles a rattan loveseat. Copia, a sage-green print, that combines berry and mushroom forms, meanwhile, is shot floating from a clothesline. The cinematic images are simultaneously dreamy and eerie — as if the rooms' occupants have only just left.

Fortunately, Zak + Fox is inviting design lovers back into the room with a new, year-and-a-half-long residency with North Carolina furniture dealer, PRB Collection. Beginning 10 February, visitors can pop by Zak + Fox's Manhattan showroom to view a selection of vintage furniture, all upholstered in Qualia, alongside more than 150 objects curated by Profera.

While qualia, by definition, are intangible, subjective phenomena, Zak + Fox has sent a clear message: it's time to get back in touch with your feelings.

Zak + Fox is located at 235 Park Avenue South, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10003

See the rest of Zak + Fox's Qualia collection

Artist Sussy Cazalet has followed an eclectic path. A background studying printed textiles and interior architecture at New York’s Parson School of Design led to a career in theatre design, before Cazalet began to create her own handwoven works.

A love of mid-century modernist design lies at the heart of her artistic practice, with her travels across India, Africa and the Middle East inspiring her textile works. In 2023, Cazelet unveiled nine woven silk-and-wool tapestries at London’s Tristan Hoare Gallery, the culmination of a close, collaborative project with weavers around the world.

Cazalet is building on these foundations with her second show at the gallery, Ascendance, here translating watercolour studies into fourteen handwoven tapestries. The results are bold and contemporary, juxtaposing instinct with studied form to create hypnotic works.

Despite the modern feel, Cazalet draws on traditional methodologies. She begins with watercolour on paper, which become richly layered and tangible tapestries created using flat-loom weaving and organic dyes. By painting in fibre, Cazelet imbues each piece with a raw edge, calling on cyclical symbols, such as the sun and moon, for an abstract and geometric celebration of materials. Works, displayed alongside watercolour studies and vintage furniture chosen by Cazalet, become immersive mediations on form.

Ascendance is at Tristan Hoare Gallery from 6 February - 20 March

Era-defining fibre artist Anni Albers and influential modernist architect Paul Rudolph crossed paths late in their careers while lecturers at Yale University in the 1950s and '60s. Yet their trajectories were remarkably similar — as were their ever-innovative contributions to the modernist canon.

The pair was reunited last week in New York as part of a special temporary exhibition staged by the Italian fabric brand Dedar. The company had recently reissued a collection of Albers’ textile designs, and Rudolph's experimental Modulightor residence in Midtown Manhattan (now the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture) was the perfect venue in which to debut the collection to a US audience.

Both multihyphenates trained in the Bauhaus tradition but continuously challenged its orthodoxy. They pushed past the austerity of 'high' modernism, advocating for a stronger focus on the artistically-expressive and culturally-responsive potential of materials and complex forms.

Dedar’s Weaving Albers collection (first debuted during Milan Design Week this April) comprises a comprehensive range of designs created over 50 years. Albers’ textiles often stemmed from her extensive travels and rediscovery of long-overlooked craft traditions. Take a design like En Route — an abstract representation of the geologic forms you can observe outside an airplane window. Developed in close partnership with the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, the offering also includes designs like Ancient Writing, a geometric translation of prehistoric Native American texts.

The Modulightor building, Rudolph's final project, reflects a similar mastery of depth and willingness to experiment. The enigmatic building is defined by its intersecting open-structure rectangles, extending from the facade through to a matrix of open-plan interiors. It just so happens that the all-white I-beams used throughout lent themselves well to the hanging of textiles, as conceived by stylist stylist Akari Endo-Gaut.

'My approach for designing this exhibition was deeply rooted in a desire to weave together three worlds: architecture, the designs of Anni Albers, and the fabrics themselves,' Endo-Gaut says. 'The iconic building by Paul Rudolph [functioned] as a loom.'

The route to Gee’s Bend, Alabama winds through forests of young longleaf pine and oak trees, and past acres of cotton planted in red earth. Buildings few and far between dot the road: low-slung homes, a brick church with a crisp white steeple, a two-pump gas station with a small grocery attached. And occasionally, a 10-foot-tall free-standing mural of a quilt appears.

Quilts helped to put Gee’s Bend, a remote enclave in Alabama’s Black Belt, on the map. These extraordinary textiles, a matrilineal tradition that began during slavery and has continued ever since, are prized around the world for their abstract patchwork and distinctive colours. And among Benders, as folks who hail from the region are known, they’re tangible representations of history, memory and kinship.

On a Saturday afternoon earlier this month hundreds of vibrantly hued and exquisitely patterned quilts were proudly displayed by their makers and the families that cherish them. Pinned on clotheslines and slung over porch railings, they fluttered in the breeze, drawing over 2,000 admirers from around the world for the fourth annual Airing of the Quilts Festival. The festival is an homage to a yearly tradition in Gee’s Bend when quilts would be taken from storage and aired before being used in winter. It is part of a new strategy to build a sustainable, equitable economy around Gee’s Bend quilts and deepen appreciation and understanding of the artistry and tradition they embody.

An artistic tradition rooted in place

‘These quilts have brand recognition,’ says Kim Kelly, the executive director of the Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy, an organisation dedicated to preserving the legacy of Gee’s Bend and one of the festival’s organisers. ‘You say “Gee’s Bend”,’ and people know the brand but they don't really know where it is.’ And location, locals and advocates say, is essential to understanding what makes the quilts and their quilters remarkable.

Gee’s Bend quilts have had many lives since women in the region first began making them in the 19th century. Their beginning is rooted in survival and necessity, and is part and parcel with the history of the land. The name Gee’s Bend comes from Joseph Gee, a plantation owner and enslaver who bought 6,000 acres of land in the area in 1816. Gee’s Bend, so-named for a hairpin-turn in the Alabama River, is surrounded by water on three sides, with just one road leading out.

Because of a lack of written records, it’s difficult to say when quilting in the region began, but the oldest known quilter in Gee’s Bend is Dinah Miller, a woman captured in West Africa as a teenager and is believed to have arrived in Alabama in 1860 onboard the Clotilda, a ship that continued to traffic humans after the US banned the international slave trade, in 1805. 'She is patient zero when it comes to many of the renowned quilters and artists of this community,' Kelly says.

After Emancipation, the formerly enslaved people in Gee’s Bend remained as sharecroppers until the 1930s but their living conditions remained difficult. At that time, the region was one of the poorest in the country. Then the US government purchased the former plantation, in 1937, and provided low-interest loans for the families to buy the land as an economic relief lifeline. Ownership enabled Benders to remain during a time when most tenant farmers were displaced. Because of this, family traditions have been able to endure, quilting included, which is now at least in its seventh generation. ‘We’re taught that you have to fend for your family,’ recalls Kelly. ‘You got to learn how to cook, you got to learn how to keep a house, and you got to learn how to quilt.’

The quilts’ patchwork design reflects the circumstances through which they were crafted. With very few resources, Benders made do with what was available to them, stitching together old clothing and cotton into quilts. The families used them for everything: to sleep under, to insulate their houses, as towels, as diapers. When the quilts became threadbare, families removed the worn sections and turned them into mops or burned them to smoke out mosquitoes. Because of this, the oldest surviving examples date from the 1920s.

Each quilter develops their own distinctive visual language – some preferring asymmetrical blocks of colour, improvisational ‘My Way’ designs, or angular patchwork. The patterns tell stories about what they feel or see, which is often objects or elements from the landscape. The quilts have names like Bricklayer, Housetop, and Log Cabin. The Housetop pattern of concentric squares is closely associated with quilters from the region. Today, roofs in Gee’s still reflect the jigsawing of different pieces of metal.

Families pass down similar techniques and quilters often collaborate with one another on designs. As William Arnett, a collector who helped bring Gee’s Bend quilts into major museum collections through a nonprofit called Souls Grown Deep, outlined in his 2006 book Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt, the quilters think of their process much like builders, comparing their assemblage of ‘blocks’ – smaller sections of a quilt that are stitched together to form the whole – to laying planks on a floor. But a step more symbolic than that, he wrote, is ‘the ways in which Gee’s Bend quilts are conceived and built ultimately [becoming] structures that organise identity and affirm human relationships’.

These relationships span time and space, and involve direct experience or intergenerational memory. ‘Whatever we are thinking about or what's going on in our lives, we typically put it into the quilt, sometimes not even knowing it,’ says Loretta Pettway Bennett, a 65-year-old quilter. ‘I tell people, it's in my blood. It's a part of my DNA. And I see it in my granddaughter, even though she’s four years old. When she was three, I started her threading needles.’

Bennett’s latest quilt is a collaborative design with a dozen other descendants of Dinah Miller, the first known named quilter. In honour of their common ancestor, they each stitched blocks out of thrifted clothing, which Bennett then sewed together. Recently, quilter Mary Virginia Pettway, who is also in her sixties, designed a piece that commemorated the lives lost during the Middle Passage, the deadly transatlantic voyage enslaved Africans endured en route to America. Pettway assembled strips and triangles of blue denim, then joined the quilt together with curved running stitches to represent the ocean and its waves; a sole red stripe in the centre symbolises the people who died along the journey. Both quilts, along with many more, appeared in ‘Between History and Memory: Dinah Miller’s Legacy In Gee’s Bend’, an exhibition at the Gee’s Bend Welcome Center curated by Emma Yau of Souls Grown Deep, which is currently working to bring more scholarship to the history of Gee’s Bend as well as its contemporary artists.

An economic lifeline

In 1966, 60 quilters formed a worker cooperative, the Freedom Quilting Bee, to turn their expertise into a living. It was a direct response to the Civil Rights movement. At the time, voter suppression tactics targeted Black residents of the surrounding Wilcox County, who had just gained the right to vote. They faced evictions, mortgage foreclosures, and job loss; a few years prior, the town of Camden, across the river from Gee’s Bend, eliminated ferry service to make it harder for its residents to vote and access services. Local civil rights leaders encouraged the women to sell their work in order to become more economically independent.

The Freedom Quilting Bee produced pieces for department stores like Saks Fifth Avenue, Bonwit Teller and Sears, developing new types of quilts to make their work more marketable, including smaller quilts for baby beds, wall hangings, and tablecloths. At its peak, the collective employed 150 women. ‘Manufacturing brought to the families an amount of wealth they had never envisioned,’ Kelly says. ‘They were able to install plumbing in their homes and buy refrigerators and washing machines. But one of the most important things they were able to do was send their children to college.’

In addition to being lucrative, it was also a socially progressive operation. The Freedom Quilting Bee also offered childcare and its formal structure enabled members to draw Social Security benefits. Their industry thrived until the mid-1980s, when offshoring decimated stateside manufacturing and longtime partners did not renew their contracts. After the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed, Freedom Quilting Bee essentially stopped manufacturing, though it stayed open through 2010.

It is only recently that the quilts have become widely celebrated internationally as works of art. After appearing in exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in the early 2000s, the profile of the quilts exploded. Oprah Winfrey featured the quilters on her show, as did Martha Stewart. They appeared on US postage stamps – the first time work by living artists was featured on them –and began to enter the collections of prominent museums, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the de Young Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Today, the quilts are represented in the collections of 40 museums on three continents. In 2022, they were the subject of an exhibition at Tate Modern, and in 2025, they featured in exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Armory Show in New York.

But the increased recognition and appreciation of Gee’s Bend quilts hasn’t always benefitted the quilters equitably. In the aughts, three quilters sued Arnett, the collector and founder of Souls Grown Deep, alleging they were cheated out of compensation for their quilts and the use of their images; one said she was forced to sign a copyright document she couldn’t read (Arnett died in 2020). In 2008, the suit was dismissed. And copyright and licensing terms aren’t favourable to the quilters – if there’s a formal agreement at all. (Souls Grown Deep has served as an intermediary between quilters and institutions and collectors who wish to buy the quilts, encouraging the quilters to price their work commensurately with the caliber of their artistry.)

‘There have been many times where people come, take the art, and we never hear from them again,’ says Claudia Pettway Charley, a fourth-generation quilter and co-founder of Sew Gee’s Bend Heritage Builders, a new non-profit she, fellow Benders, and their descendants founded to help the community develop more sustainable and equitable business partnerships. Recently this included collaborations with Chloé, the fashion designer Greg Lauren, Dedar and Stephen Burks Manmade (previewed at the 2025 Venice Biennale) and Adidas, which also sponsored the 2025 edition of the Airing of the Quilts.

Meanwhile, most museum collecting to date has focused on older quilts and the artists who appeared on the postage stamps. More recently, non-profits have helped quilters to sell directly to customers through initiatives like Etsy storefronts and at events like the Airing of the Quilts.

However, sales can still be uneven. At the festival, Marlene Bennett Jones, a quilter born in 1947, stitched away on a black, purple, and white piece stretched on a frame made from PVC pipes while surrounded by family, friends, and dozens of quilts swaying in the wind. For Jones, quilting is a source of pride and a passion more so than a viable way to make a living. While some museum-quality quilts can fetch $50,000, those rates are rare. ‘It’s like being a starving artist,’ Jones says. ‘If you wait to sell something, you will starve.’

Recently, various groups involved with Gee’s Bend have rallied around a new strategy to develop an economy around the quilts: cultural tourism. The hope is that more visitors will come to the area to buy quilts, attend workshops and retreats, and gain an understanding of the work that can only be appreciated in person, directly from the culture bearers themselves. ‘We don't want people in the world to think that this place is like some ethereal thing that you can't touch,’ Kelly says. ‘It is alive, it's living. It has always been alive and living for over 200 years.’

Lue Ida McCloud, a 74-year-old quilter who was born in Gee’s Bend, echoes Kelly’s sentiment about how open quilters in the region are. ‘We’re just a group of people, we love what we do, and we try to help whenever we can,’ McCloud says. Her classes have included quilters as far away as London and Greece. 'I just love doing what I do,' she reiterates. ‘Working on a quilt, it takes your mind off everything, off all your problems and all your situations.’

Reintroducing Gee’s Bend

Gee’s Bend is remaking itself into a visitor-friendly destination. It’s aligned with a strategy happening across Alabama, and the Deep South: heritage tourism is becoming a tool for revitalisation and economic development, with initiatives like the Legacy Sites, in Montgomery, and the Africatown Cultural Mile, in Mobile. If the region’s fame from postage stamps and museum exhibitions could help restore ferry service in 2006, after a 40-year shutdown, what else could increased visibility accomplish? The town recently unveiled the Gee’s Bend Heritage Trail with funding from Souls Grown Deep, a self-guided driving tour.

This year, the Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy renovated and reopened the original building where the collective manufactured quilts to visitors. It now features a shop, an exhibition, and quilting demonstrations. ‘Many people look at meeting a Gee's Bend Quilter as a bucket-list item,’ Kelly says. ‘I would see ’em driving up and down the road with out-of-state licence plates. I knew what they were looking for, but other than the Quilting Collective, which is up the road and whose hours are kind of haphazard, there was no place to connect to these people.’

And last year, Souls Grown Deep opened a new art gallery in Gee’s Bend to give visitors and locals alike another destination to connect with the history and culture of the region. ‘There's a whole roster of [Gee’s Bend] exhibitions, but so much of that was done outside of this community,’ says Raina Lampkins-Fielder, chief curator at Souls Grown Deep. ‘We wanted to do it here so that people can see the history and the artistry that is continuing. It’s living.’

It’s working. The main event is the Airing of the Quilts. In addition to becoming an open air gallery where visitors can admire and purchase quilts – over 80 quilters offered everything from $20 machine-stitched potholders to hand-sewn full-sized quilts going for tens of thousands of dollars – the festival featured live quilting demonstrations and workshops, live music, and food.

It’s attracting visitors from around the world. On my flight to Alabama, I sat next to a woman from Los Angeles who organised a family reunion in Gee’s Bend in honour of her grandmother, who loved quilting. And at my Airbnb in Selma, I met a group of quilters from North Carolina who turned their desire to see the festival into a road trip.

Quilters of all stripes – the famous ones represented in museums as well as artists who have moved to the area to immerse themselves in the tradition – proudly displayed their handiwork. The home of Mary Lee Bendolph, a quilter who was featured in a Pulitzer-winning Los Angeles Times story and named to this year’s Forbes 50 over 50 list, is on the Gee’s Bend Heritage Trail. For the festival, she and her daughter, Essie Bendolph Pettway, strung up quilts the two had made together. From their perch on Bendolph’s porch, they greeted admirers who hopped off tour shuttles to see their work up close. Bendolph, who is now in her nineties and has dementia, still stitches blocks, but no longer makes full-sized quilts on her own, Pettway explains to me. She’ll combine her blocks with her mother’s to finish a piece. After completing a design, she’ll share it with her mother, who offers creative feedback. After Bendolph said one design needed a little yellow and red, Pettway used those hues for the border.

The festival has also become an important draw for the descendants of Gee’s Bend, lending it the feeling of a family reunion. Tangular Irby, who is Dinah Miller’s great-great-great granddaughter, is one such descendant. At the festival, she read from Pearl and Her Gee’s Bend Quilt, a children's book she wrote, and explained why documenting history to connect with the youngest Benders is important. ‘My biggest regret, having grandmothers that were Gee's Bend being quilters, is I never learned to quilt from them,’ she told the crowd. ‘Why? Because as a child, I didn't know that was special.’

Sustaining the community

As the business of Gee’s Bend grows, whether from tourism or through partnerships, the hope is that the gains can be reinvested directly into the community so that it remains a vibrant place for all generations. Despite international acclaim, the lack of basic infrastructure (Gee’s Bend still doesn’t have services like street lights, sidewalks or a community center) is a reminder of systemic neglect and that cultural heritage, however priceless, doesn’t translate to dollars and cents.

Right now, the Gee’s Bend Welcome Center, which is oriented toward tourism, has served as a makeshift community center, but it has been a tight squeeze. ‘If we have a birthday party at the Welcome Center, then they have to dismantle the museum,’ Charley, the fourth-generation quilter and founder of Sew Gee’s Bend Heritage Builders, says. Additionally, since there is no place for women to drop in and quilt together, the art form has become a solitary activity. She hopes to build a centre with the proceeds that her organisation earns from collaborations.

Keeping Gee’s Bend at the heart of the region’s quilting tradition is central to recent advocacy efforts. ‘It's important for rural communities to see that you don't have to be in a big city to benefit wherever you are in life,’ Charley says.

‘I don’t understand why our world, which is so controlled by human decisions, has evolved to such muted colours in daily life,’ laments the fashion designer Raf Simons, sunk into a fire-engine-red Jean Royère armchair in the front room of his vast, Liberty-style villa in Milan. Wearing, perhaps incongruously considering the topic of conversation, his monochrome uniform of a black sweatshirt and stiff, black jeans.

He’s speaking with Wallpaper* on the occasion of his latest launch with Danish textile brand Kvadrat, the ‘Shaker System’ collection for children, inspired by the modular storage rails commonly found in Shaker households. As well as two new textiles, ‘Ria 2’ and ‘Saxion’.

Shaker systems for kids

When we speak, Simons is a few days out from presenting the S/S 2026 collection for Prada, which he co-designs with the brand’s founder, Miuccia Prada. The pulse of fashion – fast-paced, ephemeral, high-stakes – feel worlds away from the quiet Protestant sect that inspired the Shaker storage system, which allows you to tidily attach objects to a fixed bar that runs the perimeter of the room.

'Normally, when you buy objects for your home, you put them on a shelf like a vase. But for things like a blanket, you either have to drape it over a sofa or fold it away in a closet,' he says. 'I always thought, if you like something, why not keep it exposed?'

The new edition, designed on a smaller scale for children, is the natural extension of that thinking. Simons has also created a range of new products that can be stored along the rail: a soft bag, a velvet teddy bear, a cushion, a wool jacquard blanket, and a hooded towel.

Raf Simons on colour

Today, sitting in his Milan living room, the topic he really wants to talk about – and what informs much of his work with Kvadrat – is colour. Or rather, the lack of it in our daily lives. 'When you think about objects we use all the time, like mobile phones – they’re always grey or black. It’s not that I dislike those colours, but I wonder why interior palettes are so often just neutral.'

His longstanding collaboration with the textile brand, he says, is a way of introducing vibrancy and expressive colour back into our domestic habitats. 'From day one, I said, if we do this, it will very much be about colour,' he says of the partnership.

He points to the ‘Ria 2’ fabric, a pointillist-inspired wool viscose that follows the original ‘Ria’, which he is launching this month in several completely new palettes: cobalt blue, black and aubergine; wisteria pink, hunter green and powder white. Simons describes the new tones as being inspired by the natural world.

'I was observing nature to design textiles,' he explains of his creative process. 'I’ve always been fascinated by those colours. I spend hours observing flowers, questioning: why is this yellow so pleasing? Why does this red feel strong? One colour is never just one colour. Often, it’s not even the colour itself, but the pigment’s interaction with other colours that attracts me. That’s how a lot of my early fabric designs began.'

October also sees the introduction of ‘Saxion’, which he describes as a gentler, warmer spin on the best-selling ‘Vidar’ boucle in colourations of ultramarine, rhodonite pink and sunflower yellow.

Simons also hints at future projects, including new textiles inspired by the work of the Vienna Successionists and bold prints of the 1970s. 'An interest of mine is fabric design with strong graphic impact,' he says. 'Design often comes from another world; you rarely invent something completely new.'

Kvadrat/Raf Simons kids collection will launch 9 October 2025 on kvadratrafsimons.com and selected stores: Barney’s New York Japan, The Broken Arm Paris, The Hyundai in Seoul and Overflow in Beijing.

Stepping inside Cosprop’s headquarters, discreetly located in a former garage on Holloway Road, north London, is like walking into a colossal dressing-up closet. There are boxes on top of boxes, from floor to ceiling, filled with fabric samples, ribbons, lace trimmings, buttons and beads. In a room with alcove shelving laden with shoes, bags, parasols, canes, and umbrellas, regal hats sit nonchalantly on top of various display heads. Glass cabinets sparkle with trinkets and accoutrements, from tiaras to paste jewellery. Then there are the acres of rails, on which clothes from six decades of period film, television and theatre hang as mille-feuilles vertically rendered in cloth. In the millinery, dye and alteration workrooms, a team beavers away with their hands, drawing, stitching and repairing, deep in concentration.

It’s deliciously organised chaos. So too is the office of John Bright OBE, Cosprop’s founder. ‘I’m sorry it’s a bit of a jumble in here,’ says the Oscar and BAFTA-winning octogenarian as he takes a seat beside an antique hand-carved room divider and a mannequin mounted with a Cosprop-made dress worn by Kate Beckinsale in James Ivory’s adaptation of The Golden Bowl (2000). This same dress, alongside 84 other garments created by Cosprop, now stars in a newly opened exhibition at London’s Fashion and Textile Museum titled ‘Costume Couture: Sixty Years of Cosprop’, which also features the work of award-winning and nominated costume designers, such as Bright’s collaborative partner Jenny Beavan (Howards End, 1992; Sense and Sensibility, 1995), Dinah Collin (Pride & Prejudice, 1995), Alexandra Byrne (Elizabeth, 1998; Emma, 2020), Michael O’Connor (The Duchess, 2008; Jane Eyre, 2011), Jacqueline Durran (Little Women, 2019), and Anthony Powell (Tess, 1979). Each turned to Cosprop to realise their visions, and still do to this day.

Inside Cosprop, cinema’s ‘dressing up box’

‘Of course, 60 years is a long time. But we managed to find and select most things we wanted to include in the exhibition,’ says Bright, who co-curated the show with Keith Lodwick, author of the accompanying book, The Costume House: The Inside Story of Cosprop. ‘There’s also another dress from The Golden Bowl that we made for Uma Thurman’s character Charlotte Stant. This one is particularly interesting to me, because it’s a fancy-dress Cleopatra costume for the masquerade ball scene set around 1904. All of the materials were sourced from one woman I found by chance on Portobello Road, who had all these funny gold embellishments that so happened to be exactly what I was looking for.’

This anecdote is just one example of the bespoke attention to detail that makes Bright’s Cosprop a singular institution. A fervent lover of ‘dressing up’ since childhood – ‘My mother would always buy dressing up clothes from a woman called Winnifred Hoyle,’ the Hampshire-born Bright recalls – he began collecting historical clothing in 1958, after a stint studying acting at RADA and then fashion at Southwest Essex Technical College. Seven years later, when he opened Cosprop at the age of 25, originally located in Primrose Hill, the collection he’d amassed formed the foundation of his craft: the direct replication of clothes in meticulous and authentic detail, right down to the materials and methods used during the time they were first designed. ‘In the 1950s and 1960s, this was virtually unheard of, as costumes for period dramas on the stage and screen were usually interpretations of the contemporary clothes people wore. I was really inspired by BJ Simmons, a costumier who operated from the 1850s to the 1930s and followed a similar approach,’ says Bright. ‘I sort of picked up the baton from where they had left it.’

As Dennis Nothdruft, head of exhibitions at the Fashion and Textile Museum, explains: ‘I think there’s an idea that if it’s a costume, for a film or TV, it isn’t a piece of clothing. It’s something else. What Cosprop does is very, very special in that it creates real clothes that transcend the idea of the stock costume – they are clothes for a real person.’ For the actors who wear a Cosprop piece – Meryl Streep, Dame Maggie Smith, Nastassja Kinski, Nicole Kidman, and more – this provides another dimension to the task of embodying a fictional character. Helena Bonham Carter, who played Lucy Honeychurch in Merchant Ivory’s A Room With A View (1985), for which Bright and Beavan won an Academy Award, is quoted in the exhibition on a wall decal. ‘John and Jenny [Beavan] created wardrobes for people; they didn’t create costumes as we might think of them. There was history in every item of clothing, and this design process helped us as actors,’ she says.

Today, the way in which period drama is consumed and produced has dramatically shifted, with bigger budgets for often smaller screens. In recent years, Cosprop has been behind costumes for acclaimed ‘binge-watch’ series, including Game of Thrones and Downton Abbey. Bright has seen this change unfold in real time. ‘When I started Cosprop, and when I worked with Merchant Ivory particularly, it was very “hand to mouth”,’ he says. ‘I remember shooting in Italy once, and carrying bags and bags of shoes on a bus to set myself. You certainly couldn’t work that way now. There would once only be four of us in the costume department; now there’d be a whole team of 12 people or more. Do you get better results? Not necessarily,’ he reflects.

Changes in technology, such as high-definition cinematography, also dictate the way that a costume is made. For Cosprop, this means even more attention is paid to the minutiae of a garment’s construction. ‘Camera lenses are now almost looking for the tiniest details,’ says Bright. ‘So it’s even more worth the effort of putting them there; otherwise, you can just get a sort of blankness on screen. It’s fascinating, really.’ Costume designer Michele Clapton reiterates this sentiment on a page of Lodwick’s The Costume House: ‘The art of costume design has had to change because of the seismic shift from film stock to high-definition digital cameras. Although many of us mourn the passing of 35mm and its magical diffused look, in many ways, the digital camera allows for greater storytelling in the details, small “Easter eggs” to be plotted into costumes for viewers to pick up on.’

During the age of AI, however, machine-generated imagery looms with uncertainty over the future of art and cinema. So, whether coincidence or otherwise, 2025 is a particularly prescient time to take note of Cosprop’s artistry, which speaks to the visceral, human nature of craft, costume and clothing. Long may it continue.

‘Costume Couture: Sixty Years of Cosprop’ is open at London’s Fashion and Textile Museum from now until 8 March 2026.

Back in 1999, the UK controversially lost a portion of William Morris’ archive when the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in California won the bid to acquire it. Measures exist to prevent such cultural exports – for example, the UK government recently managed to keep an iconic Barbara Hepworth sculpture in the country, allowing institutions to raise the funds to purchase it. In 1999, however, no such intervention occurred, and the Morris materials went to the US.

Now, Morris & Co. – the original company founded by Morris, today part of the Sanderson Design Group, a luxury interior furnishings brand – is partnering with The Huntington to present The Unfinished Works, a new collection of 26 designs derived from previously incomplete sketches by Morris and his creative director, John Henry Dearle.

The collaboration began when The Huntington found over 50 unfinished works in its archive. These pieces, spanning a variety of mediums including fabrics, wallpapers, tiles and stained glass, existed in varying stages of completion. Their discovery sparked the idea for Morris & Co. to bring these dormant designs to life.

The Unfinished Works features a range of designs – from wallpapers and borders to fabrics, weaves and embroideries. The colour palette is drawn directly from Morris & Co.’s historical logbooks, ensuring authentic pigmentation and tonal accuracy.

Produced in the Morris & Co. studio in Chiswick, London, and manufactured at the brand’s historic UK factories in Loughborough and Lancaster, the collection is not just about recreating the past. It also adds a contemporary layer to the work, in the pioneering spirit of Morris himself. The creative team used Morris and Dearle’s notes and references as both blueprint and inspiration – interpreting them through a contemporary lens. This project bridges both time and geography – uniting the present-day Morris & Co. with its 19th-century origins, and reconnecting the UK-based company with the archive that had once seemed lost.

‘As artists, we’ve asked ourselves not what we should do, but what we can do to preserve, refine and complete these exquisite pieces of archival art, making them relevant not only to today but also to the future as part of art history,’ says lead designer Jess Clayworth. ‘The “Co.” in Morris & Co. is alive and well in The Unfinished Works.’

William Morris (1834-896) was a towering figure of the nineteenth century – a political theorist, publisher, environmental campaigner, poet and, of course, designer. He founded Morris & Co. in 1861, which grew into a thriving Arts & Crafts business. In reawakening its unfinished works, the brand reconnects the threads of a remarkable legacy in a true testament to the enduring relevance of Morris’s vision.

The collection will be available through Morris & Co.'s website and selected retailers

Patricia Urquiola has teamed up with Copenhagen-based design firm Tableau to present a new textile collection for Kvadrat. Unveiled to coincide with Chart 2025 (28-31 August), Copenhagen’s contemporary art fair, the textiles are inspired by forestry and nature in the Nordic region.

Patricia Urquiola presents ‘In Nature We Trust’ for Kvadrat

Designed by Patricia Urquiola for Kvadrat, the collection, ‘In Nature We Trust’, is rooted in the form and colour of the natural environment. It is being presented initially via an installation by Tableau at Kvadrat’s Copenhagen showroom – ahead of an autumn release – which sees the fabrics draped like a canopy and wrapped around tree branches and furniture alike to create an immersive textile forest for visitors to explore.

Coupled with the whimsical installation is a dreamy tablescape, also staged by Tableau (whose past projects include the design of a mental health space in Copenhagen and bringing a Poul Gernes flower lamp to life). Each object, from vases to fruit and plates, is also enveloped in the new textile range.

Delicate bark-like striations are woven into the installation design, while the soft tonal colour palette – from deep blues and olive greens through to warm oranges and lilacs – makes an elegant feast for the eyes.

Urquiola has collaborated with Kvadrat since 2013 and released several textiles, including the world’s first upholstery textile made of 100 per cent ocean-bound plastic (which won a Wallpaper* Design Award in 2024).

The installation is on display at the Kvadrat showroom, Pakhus 48, Klubiensvej 22, 2150 Copenhagen

Ikea is more than a furniture store – it’s a global symbol of bold, functional and democratic design. Few brands have achieved what it has: the creation of an aesthetic language so coherent that it resonates across 63 countries of operation. That’s not just influence – it’s cultural authorship.

At the heart of this identity lies the brand’s textiles, which are almost as iconic as its flat-pack furniture. Playful and eclectic, Ikea’s patterns helped rewrite expectations of what homes could look like.

A new exhibition at Edinburgh’s Dovecot Gallery – ‘Ikea: Magical Patterns’, which opens today (18 July) and runs until 17 January 2026 – asks: how did the brand make prints, colour and visual boldness central to everyday interiors? Showcasing 180 textile designs, it celebrates those who have helped define Ikea’s visual DNA. We explored the show ahead of its opening.

The birth of a design language

In the 1940s and 50s, avant-garde textiles were usually confined to elite homes. Mass-market fabrics were muted and predictable – and often floral. Ikea, founded in 1943 by 17-year-old Ingvar Kamprad (‘Ikea’ is an acronym formed from his name and address), was initially no different. ‘You go through the early catalogues, and everything was beige or grey,’ observes Anna Sandberg Falk, an exhibition curator at the Ikea Museum in Älmhult, Sweden. ‘Then there was this really strong idea at the beginning of the 1960s to add something – and colour was that thing.’

In the early 1960s, Kamprad made a pivotal move: not a textiles expert himself, he hired young, mostly female designers from art schools and industrial backgrounds to revamp the department. Designers such as Benita Haymach and Ann-Charlotte Andersson were given almost total creative freedom. ‘They worked with these bold – and, at the time, quite provocative and unexpected – patterns and colours, inspired by contemporary art, everyday life and youth culture. And that turned into a really strong Ikea thing – an identity we still carry today,’ notes Sandberg Falk.

Icons of innovation

One of the most influential figures of this period was textile artist Inez Svensson. From 1971, she led a shift toward geometric patterns that felt modern and punchy – designs like ‘Strix’ and ‘Strax’, noteworthy for their horizontal stripes at a time when most machines only printed vertically, and which landed on the cover of the 1972 Ikea catalogue.

Svensson also co-founded the design collective 10-Gruppen (‘Group of Ten’), which was formed with a mind to challenge the dominance of dainty florals in textiles. Its 1978 collection for Ikea introduced bold, youthful patterns and, in 1980, Svensson initiated a long-term collaboration between the group and the brand. 10-Gruppen’s work was revived in 2017 at Ikea, underscoring its lasting relevance.

Another key designer was Sven Fristedt, who joined in 1967 and introduced a range of organic, psychedelic and Nordic folk-inspired motifs (‘Myrten’, ‘Tarantella’, ‘Sommargyllen’ and ‘Alfi’) which further pushed the boundaries of what ‘tasteful’ design could look like – it could be quirky – even a bit odd. ‘They’re not weird, that’s not the right word,’ says Sandberg Falk. ‘But they’re fun in a way. There’s something curious about them.’

The golden era and beyond

The 1970s were the golden age of Ikea textiles, setting the blueprint for the brand’s future. Svensson continued to contribute graphic works into the 1980s and 90s, such as ‘Randig Banan’ (1985), the striped banana print, which returned in 2013 to much fanfare. Children’s prints by designers like Anna-Lena Emdén, including ‘Sigge Snagg’ and ‘Konrad/Pensel’, introduced humour and narrative to home goods, showing that homes could be lighthearted and imaginative – not just restrained and ‘grown-up’.

The millennium yielded patterns such as Anna Sörensson’s ‘Stockholm’ (2006), which remains popular today, and Ikea's 80th anniversary Nytillverkad collection (2023), which included ‘Svedjenäva’ (based on ‘Alfi’) and ‘Nickfibbla’ (based on ‘Strix’ and ‘Strax’).

The creative freedom that Ikea extends to its designers remains unchanged: freelance designer Ida Pettersson Preutz recalls her first brief for the brand, which was to create a pattern based on food. Inspired by ‘Randig Banan’, which she had loved as a child, she sketched broccoli (now the ‘Anniken’ print): ‘At first, the feedback was, “We like it, but we want more.” So I added a rough pencil-drawn background – and that was it. They said, “Now we’ve got it.”’ Another pattern was repeatedly rejected by clients until she showed it to Tom Hedqvist, another Ikea designer and co-founder of 10-Gruppen. ‘He pointed to the sketch that everyone else had said no to, and said, “that one”,’ Pettersson Preutz recalls.

The Ikea effect

Ikea’s approach to pattern design wasn’t just about aesthetics – it was rooted in its philosophy of accessibility, championed from the outset by the famously frugal Kamprad. ‘The starting point at Ikea is always a price that’s affordable for people,’ says Sandberg Falk. ‘Form, function and style are built around that constraint. In this model, textiles are key – they’re often the easiest way to bring design into the home without spending a fortune.’

In this way, textiles ‘[gave] ordinary people access to bold taste’, the curator continues. Ikea's patterns didn’t – and don’t – demand design literacy; they encourage creativity and play. Fabrics sold by the metre and a mix-and-match ethos (the 2024 ‘Tyg’ line, for example, features pre‑cut cotton fabrics, designed to inspire DIY and upcycling projects with no sewing skills required) empower people to be co-creators of their homes. ‘That’s one of our missions – we want to open up the design world for the many.’

'Ikea: Magical Patterns' will run until 17 January 2026 at Dovecot Gallery in Edinburgh

Amid Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, the starvation and displacement of millions of Palestinians, and the deliberate targeting of Palestinian heritage, ‘Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine’ at V&A Dundee brings together a vital and urgent display of hundreds of garments and textiles, personal photographs, and rare artefacts that span nearly 150 years of Palestinian history: from the late 19th century through to the British Mandate, the Nakba of 1948, the First and Second Intifadas, into today’s catastrophic siege on Gaza. The messaging behind the exhibition is clear: to bear witness to the resilience of the Palestinian people through the clothes and garments that tell stories and hold memories, and embroidery that resists erasure.

More than a textile exhibition, the works on display are preserved from the ongoing destruction of cultural heritage sites – including museums and libraries – in the region. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities-Palestine, more than 200 culturally significant sites have been damaged or destroyed since October 2023 alone, while Unesco has called for their protection. Among institutions destroyed are the Central Archives in Gaza, the Rashad Shawa Cultural Center, and the Beit Hanoun Public Library. The exhibition at V&A Dundee is presented in collaboration with the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit in the West Bank and Hayy Jameel, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It is free to the public, and it could not come at a more critical time.

‘Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine’ at V&A Dundee

‘It’s an ever-evolving project and opportunity to keep telling stories in different ways through different objects,’ says curator Rachel Dedman. ‘We’re addressing the genocide in Gaza and the brutal occupation of Palestine, but more broadly, I think, glimpsing the ways in which grief is written into objects, the way clothing was connected to love or motherhood. These are very simple and quiet ways in which garments can speak to us.’ In Palestine, tatreez (embroidery) is not merely decorative; it is a language. Passed down through generations of women, it is a vernacular of identity, belonging, and resistance, stitched into dresses, jackets, and shawls to tell stories and preserve cultural memory. Each village (many of which have since been destroyed and erased from the map) once had its own distinct patterns, colours, and motifs; visual dialects that carried personal and communal histories.

A single dress might record a woman’s marital status, the number of her children, her region, or losses that she carried. The exhibition documents garments made during the British Mandate era in Palestine (1920-1948), a period of colonial rule that played a significant role in shaping modern Palestinian identity, and in laying the groundwork for the structural violence that endures today. Tellingly, many garments from this time include linings made from British imported tartans and textiles, remnants of a colonial power whose policies of partition and displacement continue to reverberate through Palestinian life. And yet, even in these materials, Palestinian women found ways to assert their heritage and quietly subvert domination.

As violence escalated during the First Intifada in the late 1980s, embroidery became an act of resistance. One particularly striking dress on display was likely stitched in secret by candlelight, using synthetic threads dyed in the banned colours of the Palestinian flag. To wear it in public was to risk arrest. The act of creating it was a form of slow resistance, or sumud – the Arabic word for steadfastness in the face of oppression. Colours carry deep symbolic weight: magenta, for example, is tied to Gaza and believed to offer protection; red, most often used in wedding garments, signifies joy; while indigo blue conveys mourning and loss.

After the Nakba in 1948, with communities uprooted and homes destroyed, many of the garments now on display became living archives; in many cases, they are the only surviving evidence of a destroyed village. One such garment is a 1920s wedding dress from Beit Nabala, a village wiped from the map in 1948. The dress is plain and modest, apart from red embroidery that climbs up each side. The body of the dress is patched, and clearly worn, with fingerprint marks and a nursing slit, which was later sewn shut and the bodice has been widened over time to fit multiple women as it passed down generations of women. There is only one known photograph of Beit Nabala, displayed beside the dress. Its faded pink threads and scorched fabric bear the brutal signature of war. ‘Palestinians have faced targeted destruction, which is part of the cultural genocide strategy, and keeping these objects safe, and keeping them visible, is the priority,’ Dedman says. ‘They should continue to tell their stories.’

Over 500 villages were erased during the Nakba. And today, the destruction continues as museums, libraries, mosques, alongside 90 per cent of Gaza’s schools have been damaged or destroyed, and hospitals, homes and cafés in Gaza are continually bombed, their resources, archives and belongings turning to ash. One of the institutions lost was the Rafah Museum, which was bombed and flattened by an Israeli airstrike in 2023. During the blast, a child’s embroidered dress was blown onto a neighbouring rooftop, where it lay for a year, exposed to sun, wind, and rain, until it was salvaged and eventually loaned to the exhibition by the Palestinian Museum, and now it's on display at ‘Thread Memory’. Along one gallery wall, the scale of loss becomes achingly clear in an installation by Scottish-Palestinian artist Leena Nammari. The wall is covered in 626 porcelain tiles, each one stamped with the cypress tree (a symbol of endurance) and each marking one of the 626 Palestinian villages destroyed since 1948.

The final gallery shifts from traditional garments to the cutting edge of Palestinian fashion today. Here, a new generation of designers wrestles with what it means to inherit a tradition under threat. Designer Zeid Hijazi has created a tartan-tatreez hybrid look inspired by a Tunisian sci-fi film, Bedouin Hacker. His sharp-shouldered silhouette evokes punk defiance and technological resistance, reflective of a metaphorical hacker cracking through the occupation’s system. The look honours Scottish tartan while celebrating Palestinian embroidery as a form of code; a language embedded in material, passed on and hacked into new forms. Also on display is Look 5 from Palestinian Central Saint Martins graduate Ayham Hassan Musleh’s ‘IM-MORTAL MAGENTA’ collection, a piece centred around his experience of growing up under military occupation. The oversized padded jacket is complete with a white skirt with silver details, and makes reference to the bullet-proof vests worn by local journalists. More than 200 journalists have been killed by the Israeli military in Gaza since October 2023, according to the UN.

What gives ‘Thread Memory’ its depth is its interweaving of past and present. Since October 2023, more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. But beyond the unfathomable human cost, another slower, quieter violence, which persisted for decades, is brought to light. The exhibition pays homage to decades of solidarity work, including the 45-year twin city partnership between Dundee and Nablus in Palestine. Since 1980, when it was illegal to fly the Palestinian flag even in parts of the occupied territories of Palestine, Dundee raised it above its City Chambers. One room displays personal photo albums from these exchanges, documenting some of the many fire engines that Dundee has sent to Nablus. Visitors can also see a dress worn by Nadia El-Nakla, wife of Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf, at his 2023 inauguration. The image went viral, as Dedman explains: ‘I remember seeing that moment and thinking how powerful it was: how a single dress can represent so much, and how the act of wearing it can resonate globally.’

‘Thread Memory’ is both archive and act of resistance. ‘I think here in the UK in particular, for those bearing witness to the suffering of Palestinians from very far away, and feeling helpless, watching that suffering, and watching the dehumanisation of Palestinian life in the media,’ Dedman says, ‘being able to read people’s names, to immerse yourself and celebrate Palestinian joy and creativity, while also acknowledging what’s happening now, has felt cathartic, beautiful and meaningful.’ In the face of a genocide, the show offers not a passive lament but a radical insistence: that Palestinian life, in all its colour, complexity, and creativity, will not be silenced by bombs or bulldozers. Because in thread, there is memory. And in memory, there is defiance.

‘Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine’ runs at V&A Dundee until Spring 2026.

vam.ac.uk

There’s a ubiquitous woven mat found across Senegal, crafted from brightly coloured ribbons of plastic. These mats form part of everyday life – laid out for informal gatherings, used as makeshift flooring in shops and markets, or as a place of prayer. Their function is fluid, adapting to the needs of the moment.

Earlier in 2025, during a residency with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Sinthian, a rural village in the southeastern region of Senegal, the mats caught the eye of New York-based designers Stephen Burks and Malika Leiper.

‘Wandering the local market, we were struck by the densely packed stalls full of colorful folded woven mats,’ Leiper told Wallpaper*. ‘Initially, we could only see the edges and accessing them required clever negotiation with the reluctant adolescent shopkeepers. The colour, pattern, and flexibility of the mats seemed ideal for what we had in mind. They also reminded us of our previous work with Senegalese basket weavers.’

The residency, for which there is no fixed brief, takes place at Thread, an artist retreat and community centre designed by Toshiko Mori. Beneath its large, undulating thatched roof sit two open-air studios – shaded gathering spaces furnished with simple, locally made bamboo chairs, used daily by children and elders from the village.

Seeing an opportunity to create something more in dialogue with the local vernacular, Burks and Leiper purchased a selection of mats and industrial zip ties from the neighbouring town of Tambacounda. They began folding, tucking and fastening the mats onto the bamboo frames, transforming them into several throne-like seating prototypes – using design as a tool for adaptation rather than invention.

Burks and Leiper found that by pressing the flat woven mats into the spaces between the bamboo armrests, they were able to create organic, flowing forms that offered a surprising degree of comfort – more than the original chairs had provided.

‘Applying a rectangular form like the woven mat to curved bamboo chairs created unexpected formal relationships that took us by surprise,’ recalls Leiper. ‘Although most of the elders barely noticed our dramatic interventions, the children were curious and delighted.’

Although ergonomic considerations were present, first and foremost, the project was an exploration of the sculptural possibilities of the mats in dialogue with Toshiko Mori's community centre.

‘We wanted to respond to our surroundings with a project that could be in dialogue with the architecture, the people, and their culture,’ explains Burks, whose practice explores who design is for – and how more people can be included in shaping it. ‘We're naturally always interested in the social dimension - how people live with things and how that use connects to their culture.’

While the project is considered an artwork by the foundation, the 'Mattts' chairs will remain outdoors to be moved and used like their original bamboo counterparts. Alongside three lampshades and two pillow-like suspended sculptures, the chairs are now part of the architectural fabric of the foundation. ‘Mattts is a “readymade” or what one might think of as an open object,’ reflect the duo. ‘Its artistic intention in the social dimension is just as important as its perception as a functional product. We see it as a starting point – both a contribution to the community at Thread and fuel for what might one day be a commercial product.’ Watch this space.

stephenburksmanmade.com

‘With “Technicolour” we believe we have found our Holy Grail product,’ said Anders Byriel CEO of Danish textile company, Kvadrat. This statement came from inside Wooltex, a discreet textile mill located in Huddersfield in the north of England, also providing us with shelter from the unpredictable summer showers. It is the somewhat guaranteed rainfall that makes England a great location for textile mills, a key part of the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s. The moisture, I am told, lends itself to the manufacture of a very soft fabric.

It is in this mill where Kvadrat’s latest collaboration with designer Peter Saville – building on a 2021 project of the same name that comprised an upholstery textile and curtains – is manufactured. The new ‘Technicolour’ collection, an upholstery textile available in 30 colourways, continues the celebration of British heritage, wool, and local craftsmanship – and contains no manmade fibres.

Kvadrat and Peter Saville’s new ‘Technicolour’

The idea behind the latest collaboration was rather simple, according to Saville. Staying at a childhood friend’s farm in north Wales in the early 2000s allowed him a moment of retrospection during which he noticed the sheep scurry across the fields in a rainbow-hued flurry. The spray-painted markings on their coats, an almost hieroglyphic code between farmers, caught Saville’s eye.

‘I wondered how a textile would look if these random filaments of colour ended up in production,’ he told Wallpaper*. ‘I wanted to add more charisma and excitement around Kvadrat. I loved the idea of the juxtaposition between these urban graffiti-like markings against the rural backdrop of the countryside.

‘This idea trickled down into “How would these colours look on a sofa”?’ Initially, Saville imagined an off-white sofa with painterly dashes on it. The final result of the contemporary collection was a pleasant surprise. ‘The sheep are pretty pop, they have a lot of graffiti going on, they're very cool. It is genius, actually.’

The textile was made in a new yarn-spinning facility at Wooltex (which is co-owned by Kvadrat). Ten base colours, from which the full array of 30 colourways derives, include five bold hues used for livestock-marking: orange, blue, green, yellow and magenta – with a pleasing link to some of the colours used in printing, notes Saville. These are accompanied by five neutrals: black, brown, a light and a dark beige, and undyed wool, a friendly ode to the sheep's naturally coat. The colours can be mixed and matched to create a vibrant weave.

‘There are a few places that make you reflect on how far you’ve come, and for me Wales allows me to do that. I used to play there as a ten-year-old and suddenly I'm 50. And it made me think, “Wow, life is really weird”,’ said the co-founder of Factory Records. ‘Sometimes you have to go away to realise what you've got. North Wales and Snowdonia, at least geographically, are really amazing, although when I was younger I did think it was quite limited, whereas Malibu is horrible.’

Saville, who co-founded Factory Records in 1978 and is best known for the record sleeves he created for Joy Division and New Order between 1979 and 1993, said he would love to have a sofa made with the new textiles, and a 'Technicolour' suit is definitely on the cards.

kvadrat.dk

Liberty has been a cornerstone of British design since 1875, its bold, floral fabrics and craftsmanship influencing style to this day. This year, the store marks its 150th anniversary.

Liberty was founded by Arthur Lasenby Liberty in the latter half of the 19th century as a small shop selling fabrics and objets d'art. It quickly became a fashionable hub – or, as Oscar Wilde called it, ‘the chosen resort of the artistic shopper’ – renowned for its oriental and Indian silks. Liberty can be broadly credited with developing the Art Nouveau style during the 1890s, and continues to be a shopping destination in the capital.

On the brand’s 150th birthday, we honour Liberty's rich heritage with ten objects which bookmark pivotal moments in its history.

Art Colours silks

When Liberty was first founded in 1875 as an emporium of fine silks, Arthur Lasenby Liberty approached Thomas Wardle, a dyer and printer in Leek, England, to develop special textile colourings for his store. Liberty’s 2023 fabric collection, ‘Art Colours’, was inspired by Wardle’s silks.

Ianthe Star ring

Japan: A Pictorial Record by Arthur and Emma Lasenby Liberty

Liberty and his wife, Emma, developed a pictorial record of their 1889 trip to Japan after becoming inspired by the local artistry and craftsmanship. This fascination has underpinned Liberty’s designs over the years, manifested through collaborations with Japanese artists, the production of Japan-specific collections, and the use of Japanese techniques. In 1988, Liberty Japan was founded, a design team that works closely with the London studio, and the ‘Japan With Love’ fashion fabric collection was launched in 2021.

The Liberty flagship

The Tudor-inspired building that houses Liberty’s flagship was designed by father-and-son architects Edwin Thomas and Edwin Stanley Hall, and constructed in 1924 using timber from two decommissioned battleships. While the design received mixed reviews at the time, the building now stands as a timeless symbol of the brand.

The Liberty scarf

Liberty began block-printing scarves and shawls at the Merton Abbey Print Works in the early 1900s; these would become the department store’s hero products, and remain so today. So crucial to the 20th-century woman’s wardrobe were Liberty scarves that the 1930s illustrator, Joyce Dennys, once wrote: ‘If you can’t afford any clothes, buy a Liberty scarf. Suitable for all occasions from golf to beachwear to dancing.’

Poppy and Daisy fabric

Liberty has been famed for its fabrics since its inception, and its ‘Classics Collection’, launched in 1979, pays homage to this. The evolving collection is an overview of the most beloved Liberty designs – the classics – including patterns such as ‘Poppy and Daisy' and ‘Betsy’, which reflect the ditzy florals of the 1930s.

Iphis bag

LBTY perfume

Liberty cushion

The Patchwork Collective house

To mark 150 years, Liberty launched ‘The Patchwork Collective’ and an exhibition titled ‘I Am. We Are. Liberty’. Following an open call, over 1,500 handcrafted patchwork squares were submitted and woven together into a quilted house, which is now on show at the Liberty flagship store, along with the exhibition, which invites audiences to explore the Liberty archive.

Liberty, Regent Street, London W1B 5AH, libertylondon.com

From 12-16 June 2025, the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt will be displayed in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London. The quilt is thought to be one of the largest community arts projects ever, and is a fascinating piece of social history, comprising 42 quilts that commemorate 384 individuals affected by HIV and AIDS.

The idea was originated by activist Cleve Jones in the US in 1985. People were invited to create textile panels commemorating loved ones lost to AIDS, which were sewn together into quilts. These were often used during protests, where the names embroidered on the panels would be read out.

Inspired by a display he saw in San Francisco, Scottish activist Alistair Hulme began a UK version of the quilt project in the late-1980s. This blossomed into the ‘Quilts of Love’ display at Hyde Park Corner in 1994, which showcased panels from the US and the UK with contributions from fashion designers.

The UK AIDS Memorial Quilt consists of 42 panels, each containing up to eight smaller panels, embroidered with testimonials, photos, documents and other tributes to individuals affected by HIV and AIDS, including prominent figures such as writer Bruce Chatwin and actor Ian Charleson. For many years, it remained in storage and faced the threat of deterioration, leading to the formation of the AIDS Memorial Quilt Conservation Partnership, which is presenting the quilt at Tate Modern.

Although effective drug treatments for HIV now exist, meaning that people with the virus can live long and healthy lives, access to these medications remains uneven and global communities continue to be impacted by the pandemic. The quilt serves as a reminder of this, as well as a way of commemorating those lost and combating the stigma still associated with HIV and AIDS. In being displayed at Tate Modern, the quilt will reach its biggest audience yet. Additionally, two live readings of the names on the quilt will take place on 14 June at 11am and 2pm, in the tradition of the protests where the quilts originated.

Siobhán Lanigan from the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt Conservation Partnership has said: ‘The purpose of our partnership is to have the quilt seen as often as possible in as many places as possible… With every viewing, the names and the lives of all the people commemorated and all those who could not be named are recognised, celebrated and brought out of the shadow of the stigma that is still associated with an HIV diagnosis today.’

Tate Modern’s director, Karin Hindsbo, has described the quilt as ‘an incredible feat of creative human expression’ and said that visitors will find it ‘a deeply moving experience’.

tate.org.uk
aidsquiltuk.org

Tucked into the inside of every collar or seam is a quiet declaration: ‘Made in India.’ ‘100% Cotton.’ ‘Dry Clean Only.’ These stitched-in scripts graze the skin, but we rarely pause to consider them. Yet they speak – to our bodies, our desires, our sense of place and value. A few words and symbols tell us where a garment came from, how to care for it, what kind of body it was made to fit. Most of all, they say: trust me. And we do. Because trust, like style, is constructed – cultivated through repetition, ritual, and image. Every region, every era, every empire has had its own markers of credibility, often more visual than textual.

In colonial India, that trust was deliberately fabricated. As British textile mills flooded the subcontinent with factory-made cloth, labels – then known as tickets, chaap, tika, or shippers’ marks –became tools of seduction.

The exhibition ‘Ticket Tika Chaap: The Art of the Trademark in the Indo-British Textile’ at the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), Bengaluru, brings these chromolithographed fragments into sharp focus. Featuring nearly 300 vividly printed labels alongside historical photographs, printed ephemera, and artwork, the exhibition looks at these tickets not just as legal trademarks or advertising gimmicks, but as aesthetic artefacts of a complex visual economy. Through gods and empires, monuments and tigers, these tags turned fabric into fantasy. They didn’t just sell cloth – they sold desire, invoking trust through motifs that were instantly recognisable, culturally specific, and emotionally resonant.

In a linguistically and culturally diverse marketplace, visuals did the heavy lifting. Hindu deities, Mughal architecture, British royals, and alpine scenes stood in for quality, authenticity, and aspiration. It didn’t matter that the fabric had little to do with the imagery. The label was a promise. In a way, it was the first thing we consumed –before we wore the cloth, we absorbed its story.

The rise of chromolithography – a 19th-century printing technology that enabled lush, colourful reproduction – helped labels become art objects in their own right. Some were repurposed as decoration or even venerated as sacred images. This exhibition reminds us that the label was never just about information; it was about influence. It mirrored the anxieties and ambitions of its time – colonial power masked in local iconography, mass production wrapped in intimate symbolism. As tools of branding, they charted the journey from handmade to machine-made, from the handloom to the factory, from identity to commodity.

Yet, they remain strangely familiar. ‘Ticket Tika Chaap’ doesn’t just excavate a forgotten visual language; it situates it within the long arc of image-making and manipulation. Even now, labels work in similar ways. Fast fashion tags continue to declare origin, fibre, fit –while concealing extractive systems that rely on low-wage labour across South and Southeast Asia. The language of trust hasn’t disappeared; it has simply been rebranded. Sleek typography, minimalist logos, and eco-certifications are the new chaaps – meant to reassure us that what we buy is ethical, desirable, worthwhile.

Today’s labels still sit close to the skin, quietly asserting where a garment was made, by whom, and for what kind of body. This assertion hasn’t gone out of fashion. If anything, it’s taken on new weight. Even in the churn of fast fashion, the label remains –required, read, reckoned with. Its text is no longer invisible. As consumers grow more conscious of the hands behind their clothes, the label becomes a site of accountability, a mirror to the global garment economy, and a reminder that the threads that touch us are always tangled in history.

‘Ticket Tika Chaap: The Art of the Trademark in the Indo-British Textile’ is at Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), Bengaluru, until November 2nd, 2025

map-india.org

Paying tribute to the work of Anni Albers, five fabrics launched by Italian textile company Dedar during the Milan Design Week 2025 offer not one, but two reasons to explore 20th-century modernism.

The project announces Dedar's collaboration with the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation and is showcased elegantly on the 16th floor of Milan's iconic piece of modernist architecture legacy Torre Velasca – designed by BBPR (the 'R' is Ernesto Nathan Rogers, a relative of Richard Rogers) and situated in the heart of the Lombardy city.

Anni Albers fabrics launched by Dedar

Albers was one of the past century's most seminal textile artists, bridging graphic design, fine art and traditional crafts (London's Tate Modern looked back on her career to mark 100 years of the Bauhaus). Her mastery can be enjoyed through a series of displays in this new exhibition, free to visit for the duration of the city's annual design festival (until 13 April).

The four fabrics on show, based on works described by the artist as ‘pictorial weavings’, are true to Albers’ style,powerful and mesmerising – and can be applied for use in upholstery, curtains, panels, and textile elements for interior spaces. The pieces mix a variety of fabrics – from wool and cotton to jute, viscose, acrylic and polyester. Their dense, multi-dimensional weave blends old and new techniques in an artful way.

The venue: Torre Velasca

The experience becomes ever more powerful, seen as it is against the backdrop of Milan's cityscape. Torre Velasca, completed in 1959, is one of the tallest buildings in the city's central district, boldly standing out as an architectural landmark – once, controversial for its unusual shape. Its characteristic mushroom-like outline, whose floorplate widens on the upper floors, offers a 20th-century interpretation of the Lombardy region's medieval castles.

‘The exploration of Albers’ work and the dialogue with her way of thinking have called for open-mindedness in creative terms – and, above all, the desire to “take thread for a walk”, without any particular destination in mind, just as Albers did, inspired by the maestro Paul Klee. The reinterpretation of textures, colours, and forms originally intended for hand weaving has put our textile expertise to the test but, as she herself used to say, “art gives us courage” and therefore, with every new research endeavour we expand our knowledge,' say Caterina and Raffaele Fabrizio, CEO and creative director of Dedar.

dedar.com

albersfoundation.org

What is a glitch? The consequence of an unstable system, glitches expose a vulnerability to threats, but they also open up the possibility of change. It’s a duality that fascinates the Philadelphia-based artist Qualeasha Wood, who jumps into the black hole of internet malfunctions in a new exhibition, ‘Malware’, at London’s Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.

In a series of tapestries, tuftings and videos, Wood marries contemporary digital culture with traditional crafts. In her hands, a digital pixel becomes a single stitch. In video works, she creates glitches by compressing text file data. ‘In this quest for something real, we produce a lot of fake images,’ says Wood. ‘For me, something that feels most natural is something that is decomposing, that’s not perfect or hiding anything. It’s about bringing all those things to the forefront.’

As well as embodying the physical glitch, Wood pulls back the curtain on web platforms themselves, introducing strings of code across her images. ‘Working with coding, and with datamoshing [a video technique with a purposely glitchy effect] in particular, has allowed the works to open up a little more, and they become less about my physical body and its appearance and more about what it’s doing in a space.’

By inserting herself into the image, Wood considers the disruption done to established systems through ‘glitches’, whether from a virus or by the Black female body. The body is ripe for both exploitation and resistance, considered particularly in her webcam self-portraits.

Wood traces this preoccupation back to her studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, from where she graduated in 2019 with a major in printmaking. Here she found herself falling down a social media rabbit hole. ‘I was constantly speaking about my experience as a Black woman, and there was a lot of resistance. While I was there, navigating this academic career and then the social life, I found I could go online, have a conversation, and have that conversation follow me. The more I engage in these conversations, the more they appear in my work.’

These dialogues led to her making her first image for a tapestry, Cult Following. ‘I believe social media is akin to a cult or religion, and a lot of my early work was heavily influenced by religion for this reason. This idea of having a following seemed to be like being exalted and scapegoated at the same time, feelings I was navigating at the time as I was one of a maximum of 40 Black students on campus.’

This duality inherent in the digital space, and the capacity it affords for both freedom of expression and hate speech, was crystalised for Wood following her experiences being doxed, something that happened to her twice. The first time, Wood hadn’t yet begun creating her tapestries, and she considered weaving her own image through them as a way of controlling the narrative. But rather than seeing the digital and traditional worlds she was weaving together as directly opposed, she says she learned they’re interconnected.

During childhood, she was surrounded by the tangible results of her great-grandmother and great-aunt’s crocheting habits, their blankets and handmade objects hanging in doorways or on walls. ‘I was drawn to craft and textiles for that familiarity. And it’s the same with computers. I’ll never know what life was like before the internet. It’s shaped everything that my generation is experiencing, including our pervasive relationship with technology. I found that they went together in terms of systems and rules, and there are moments for exploitation and play within that.’

Wood creates her artworks on a computerised loom, which reads a file and creates a replica of an image. It was inspired by the first tapestry she received, a gift from her grandmother and aunt, which depicted her brother and cousins as babies. ‘That was the first time I realised an image could be woven and that it didn’t have to be stylistic. These were scanned images that my aunt had slapped into some collage maker and thrown onto a website. I think the immediate access of that was really important for me, and the fact that this craft object was not performing in the way that we usually see tapestries in museums was interesting.’

The most time-consuming part of the creation process is looking through the screenshots on her phone, of which she estimates there are around 30,000-40,000. Choosing which to recreate is instinctive, while weaving the works themselves is the least labour-intensive component. It takes a few weeks, she says, where ‘I release it from my control, and I’m praying that I get my way. It’s literally almost always a surprise.’

Wood calls herself an avid consumer, typically engaging in around 14 hours of screen time a day. ‘I need my works to be quick, especially if I’m making work about the internet. Something that happened last month is already so old, and I think the work dates itself in that way.’

Working in pixels celebrates an aesthetic beyond the parameters of traditional beauty. ‘I’m not interested in looking pretty and posing. The tapestries, especially, have always been a double-edged sword. I want to be in control of how my body is perceived, so I’m cutting out the middle man and displaying myself in this way. But I’m also hyper-aware of the voyeuristic gaze that still benefits from that. The glitch becomes a marker of vulnerability, but it also has its own power, denying access to this very feminine, perfect thing. It allows me a lot of space.’

‘Malware’ will be on show until 26 April at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, Heddon Street, London W1, houldsworth.co.uk

This article appears in the May 2025 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from 3 April, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Jonathan Baldock crafts wild magic in his immersive exhibitions. Working primarily with clay and natural textiles, the British artist weaves together pagan traditions, expressive natural forms, and the deep connection he shares with the women in his family. For ‘0.1%’ at London Mithraum Bloomberg Space, he challenges the patriarchal roots of this former Roman Temple, which was built to worship the macho god of justice and war. A four-metre-tall mother-goddess figure towers over the exhibition.

'The divine feminine predates the temple of Mythras,' Baldock tells me, when we meet in his east London studio ahead of the opening. 'But the older, divine feminine goddess figures were knocked to the side by warrior societies.' His idol is powerfully built, cloaked in a long coat covered in swirling vines and flowers. Her outfit is made from heavy hessian, like the fabric bags used for hop picking, a long tradition within his family. Its thick, loose weave fits her looming proportions. 'It looks like a giant could have made it,' he considers. 'It has an otherworldliness.'

The head is based on a sculpture the artist made of his mother when he was a child; he has scaled it up in bronze, with lapis lazuli embellishments. 'I remember making this figure from earth dug out of the back garden. Kent soil is claylike; it’s raw and sticky. Like a lot of parents, she told me it was incredible! I remember feeling very proud.' The new head is both endearing and intimidating; Baldock was keen to embrace this duality, presenting a potent, complex maternal figure. 'I was a queer kid in a single parent family until she married my stepfather, and she took on multiple roles. It would be very easy to make it all cheesy and cosy, but I wanted to show the hard-working person who held down multiple jobs and could be terrifying as well.'

The mother-goddess sits at the centre of a grid of poles which create a maze-like viewing experience and capture Baldock’s childhood memories of hop gardens. 'There’s a feeling you get in these spaces which is a bit like a forest. I like the idea that it’s not an easy path through.' The use of coppice, which involves cutting lengths of wood but never killing the plant, reflects the artist’s interest in traditional farming techniques which have a symbiotic relationship with nature.

Amongst the poles is a selection of ceramics and textiles covered in luscious images of bees, foliage, and sacred geometry, as well as his mother’s favourite flowers: bluebells and snowdrops. Teeth, umbilical cords, and hair are also pictured, mirroring parental keepsakes and DNA which runs through generations. Baldock’s mother created a heart sculpture and rendering of the artist’s head from Kent soil, which sit out of sight within the goddess. There is also an ambient soundscape created with Baldock’s frequent collaborator Luke Barton, which includes whispers, bird song, and the sound of hop pickers.

The title comes from the minute genetic difference that exists amongst all humans: 0.1%. 'At the centre of the work is my belief that most humans are good,' he tells me. 'When societies were smaller, often working with the land, everyone knew each other. They knew their place in the community. Now, we’re so overwhelmed. We need to be constantly reminded of our similarities. We are all brothers and sisters, the amount of DNA we share is so huge in comparison to what separates us.'

These ideas feed into Baldock’s upcoming solo exhibition at Edinburgh’s Jupiter Artland. For ‘Wyrd’ (opening 10 May), Baldock is creating textile and ceramic animal sculptures inspired by vintage soft toy manuals and based on creatures that have been observed to have same-sex relationships. Animals such as penguins will be shown in hybrid with mythological creatures, inspired by Sacha Coward’s ‘Queer as Folklore’, which positions the old Norse word ‘wyrd’ as a special otherness that is connected with ancient goddesses. “Certainty when I was growing up, ideas around what was ‘normal’ were impressed through the natural world,” says Baldock. “This recent scientific focus on same sex relationships between animals hit a chord. It’s a middle finger up to the idea of not being ‘as you’re supposed to be’. I hope it will be very inclusive, disarmingly funny, and beautiful.”

Jonathan Baldock's ‘0.1%’ at London Mithraum Bloomberg Space runs until 5 July 2025

londonmithraeum.com

The essence of Beirut is welcomed into Ledbury Road in Notting Hill. The popular London address is home to a new pop-up, by Bokja, a design collective founded in 2000 by two friends, Maria Hibri and Huda Baroudi. Large windows show a glimpse of the textile universe that unfolds inside, a patchwork of furniture, deep armchairs, long cushioned stools, and colourful benches. In the heart of the room is a small embroidered pouf. Resting carefully on top is a silver plate with a piping hot pot of herbal tea, with Lebanese sesame biscuits on offer. As you enter, the space echoes with conversation and storytelling, its tempo not faltering for any new arrivals, which creates a warm and familiar atmosphere, and evokes a feeling of stepping into a family front room, rather than a pop-up shop.

Inside Bokja’s Notting Hill pop-up

The Turkish word ‘bokja’ means ‘bundle’ or the piece of fabric used to wrap the dowry of a bride. This is something that is usually passed down through generations, and even buried with a loved one when they pass on. In an antique market, Baroudi found her own bokja, a large navy square with delicately embroidered birds. This latter became the design collective's logo.

Baroudi’s love for collecting fabrics from Beirut, coupled with Hibri’s knowledge of antique furniture led to the creation of their brand, known for its unique, custom textile installations, furniture, and exquisite embroidery work.

It is easy to be engulfed into the founders’ world of tapestry, and their enthusiasm is contagious. Each piece has a unique backstory, varying from nostalgia (many pieces are upholstered from their own children’s outgrown clothes) to symbols of hope during conflict. Eyes are drawn to every corner of the shop, whether by the intricate stitching on the ‘Cynzia’ poufs or the 3D tapestries, such as ‘Le Festin’, which is inspired by Lebanese culinary traditions – a feast for the eyes and a testament to the founders' love of community.

Baroudi and Hibri are equally as distracted as their visitors by the intricacies, and explore each piece as if it has been rediscovered, sharing its unique story, until their enthusiasm flows to the next object. This passion underscores their work, which is rooted in textile craftsmanship.

Bokja’s atelier in Beirut’s ‘Antique District’ has brought together artisans and designers from over ten countries to collaborate on meaningful narratives through textiles. The creative process is open, ideas are bounced around freely, and the results are pieces where each detail informs another.

The studio's positivity in the face of adversity is in evidence throught its work. Among the homeware, for example, the collection ‘Sounds of Silence’ came during the global pandemic, when there was such uncertainty. But a subsequent collection, ‘Sound of Music’, was intended to provide hope and positivity; cushions titled ‘Doe a Deer’ and ‘Whiskers on Kittens’ are not only playfully named but showcase expert embroidery and textile work that brings song lyrics to life in an uplifting and irreverent way. It's a perfect representation of Bokja and its individual blend of traditional craftsmanship and modern perspectives.

The Bokja pop-up is located on 85 Ledbury Road, W11 2AG, Notting Hill, London until 25 March 2025 bokja.com

Since her appointment in 2016, Dior’s artistic director of womenswear, Maria Grazia Chiuri, has been a staunch advocate of women artists, drafting radical figures – from Judy Chicago to Mickalene Thomas and Penny Slinger – to design site-specific installations to backdrop her runway shows. A T-shirt in her first collection, which read ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ from a quote by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, can now be read as a statement of intent from the Italian designer, who has always championed a woman-centric approach to creating her collections (notably, she is the first female creative director of the Parisian house).

Yesterday afternoon (27 January 2025) in Paris, Chiuri – who is now close to completing her first decade at Dior – drafted the latest in a roster of women artists to design the show space for the house’s S/S 2025 haute couture collection. Presented in a specially constructed box in Paris’ Musée Rodin, its exterior was adorned with paintings by Rithika Merchant, a Mumbai-based artist known for her colourful evocations of mythical scenes, which often feature lush elements of flora and fauna. Inside, translated by Karishma Swali and the artisans of the Chanakya School of Craft – a Mumbai-based organisation preserving historic Indian craft – her paintings were stretched on tapestries across the walls, reinterpreted in thousands of hand stitches (Chanakya remains best-known for its embroidery).

Rithika Merchant’s fantastical show set for Dior Couture S/S 2025

Merchant first met Swali, who is the creative director of Chanakya and a longtime champion of women artisans, at Dior’s Pre-Fall 2023 show in Mumbai (Chanakya created a monumental ‘toran’ for the show at the Gateway to India, taking an extraordinary 35,000 hours of craft to complete). ‘Karishma Swali originally discovered my work and introduced Maria Grazia Chiuri to it,’ Merchant tells Wallpaper*. ‘I came to Mumbai for the Dior show in 2023 and got a chance to tour the Chanakya School of Craft. When [Dior] told me about this project and I saw the work they do at Chanakya, I was immediately on board and the collaboration blossomed from there – they really allowed me the space to explore my ideas fully.’

Dior describes Merchant’s work as ‘convening stories of womanhood across generations’, with the work in the showspace – titled ‘The Flowers We Grew’ – looking back to the tales of her ancestors from her mother’s side, who originate from the coastal state of Kerala. The large-scale textiles, which enveloped guests in the showspace, were a fantastical assemblage of elements, from anthropomorphic figures to constellations of stars, leaves, flowers, and roaring animals. The work’s title comes from Merchant’s assertion that ‘the seeds we plant in the past grow into the flowers of the present’, referring to what Dior calls ‘the continuous narratives passed on down the years through a powerful line of matriarchs’.

I’ve always been inspired by tapestries – especially those that are narrative in nature,’ explains Merchant, who alongside her painting, has also worked with embroidery hooks prior to the collaboration with Chanakya. ‘Needlework, collaging, quilting, weaving, etc have long been considered “women’s work”. However, I think there is something powerful in taking whatever scraps you can find and putting them together to create something meaningful. These mediums also subvert historic ideas of how women create. Working with Chanakya has been a huge highlight for me – seeing how these master embroiderers work up close was incredible.’ (In total, the work took 306 artisans an incredible 144,000 hours.)

As for how the work interplayed with the collection – which saw Chiuri embrace a kind of childlike wonder with richly adorned crinolines inspired by the fantastical journey of Alice in Wonderland – Merchants says that they ‘talked a lot about childhood memories and stories and how both these things shape us and our creative process,’ she explains. ‘Both the collection and my work are about building a wonderland that you can fully immerse yourself in.’

‘It was amazing and very surreal to see my work at this scale,’ Merchant says of attending the show yesterday afternoon, which took place during a brief moment of sunshine amid a day of rain, allowing guests to linger on the box’s richly decorated exterior. ‘It’s such an immersive installation and I feel so lucky to have been given the opportunity to have free reign to make my vision come to life in this beautiful space. I’m so grateful to Dior for letting my creative vision fly free.’

dior.com

Certain fairs have the task of untangling the strings of the present so that we can read future threads. This is literally the task of Heimtextil, the largest international trade fair for home and contract textiles, the 2025 iteration of which we attended last week (14-17 January) in Frankfurt, Germany.

The vast Messe Frankfurt fairgrounds showcased halls of yarns, fabrics, and prints – with designer Patricia Urquiola as a very special and long-awaited guest. ‘Heimtextil is growing and this year welcomes over 3,000 exhibitors and participants from 130 countries. Patricia Urquiola has created an installation here that brings us closer to textile design in a unique way. Visitors experience with all senses how state-of-the-art materials, AI, digital printing techniques, and recycled fabrics come together,’ said Detlef Braun, member of the Executive Board of Messe Frankfurt.

After weaving our way through Heimtextil’s fairgrounds, and walking miles in the process, Wallpaper* reports on the highlights, which offer insight into where the textile industry is heading in 2025.

Heimtextil 2025 highlights

Patricia Urquiola

‘Shoes off!’ Patricia Urquiola exclaimed. At Heimtextil, she showcased ‘among-us’, an open and welcoming installation that began with a grid on the floor. However, to enter the heart of the installation, which looked like a sculpture park, you were asked to remove your shoes, and walk on a soft surface, which brought relief after long hours of walking on the fair floor.

‘I wanted to create a two-layered space, with digital and physical elements,’ said Urquiola. The sensory invitation included rational modular sofas from Kettal with soft Kvadrat wool in light purple, and four tapestries by CC-tapis created with an innovative robo-tufting machine. The latter appeared almost transparent thanks to Econyl, an innovative yarn made from nylon waste. Next to them was a hanging structure of panels, made of mineral aggregates mixed with a new-generation cementing binder called Cimento. All around were ‘massive creatures’, as she described them, by Moroso – each incorporating a fabric produced using innovative water-based printing methods that reduce both water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Other CC-tapis carpets were developed using the traditional dhurrie technique.

‘It’s an intuitive work, we worked a lot on colours, on materials – using a printing material was a first time for me. In your creative work you need to break boundaries and get fluid,’ said Urquiola.

Alcova

Curated by the Milanese design platform Alcova, this year's Heimtextil Trends 25/26 show – part of the wider fair – had the theme ‘Future Continuous’ and provided a glimpse into the future of textiles. On a long table, one after the other, three sectors emerged, each containing a variety of fabrics from the exhibitors on display: 'Regenerative' explored biodegradable fabrics and new ways to reconsider the life span of a material; 'Radically Restructured' looked at digital weaving and techniques that can mimic the unpredictable nature of natural production; and 'Naturally Uneven' celebrated the imperfection of natural materials.

Lanerossi

Have you never understood how to wash cashmere, or are you perhaps concerned about the environmental impact of dry cleaning? This is when Lanerossi steps in, presenting ‘Lavabili’, its machine washable plaids and blankets made of 100 per cent cashmere and 100 per cent wool, which can be washed at home in the washing machine. The products are certified Global Organic Textile Standard, an international standard for clothing and fabrics made from natural fibres sourced from organic farms.

Lavatech

Among our discoveries at the fair, Yagi & Co's new material containing high-quality underground lava rock deserves a special mention. It's called Lavatech, and as the name implies, it's made by finely crushing lava rock found in the ground around Mount Fuji before weaving it into fibres. According to the brand, it has a strong far-infrared effect (far-infrared radiation being the kind of electromagnetic waves that deliver thermal effects, promoting blood circulation), and so will enable the development of new products to address a range of health and wellbeing issues, spanning sleep, sports and beauty.

Wellbeing

According to Beddinghouse, skincare begins in the bedroom. The bed and bath linen company launched a skincare pillowcase with collagen fibres that work while you sleep, ensuring (the brand says) long-term benefits even after multiple washes. A sheet designed for athletes, or active people in general, is also interesting – it's designed to boost circulation and support muscle recovery, allowing you to wake up feeling revitalised.

Bedding and home textile brand Lameirinho, meanwhile, presented pyjamas designed to help regulate temperature – so no more duvet wars for couples with different temperature requirements. The pyjama textile uses ‘advanced chemical inducers’ that engage with the skin on a deeper level – so the warming sensation is more than just a feeling, it enhances blood flow.

Digital

At Heimtextil, digital technology, particularly artificial intelligence, was given special attention. Kornit Digital specialises in on-demand digital fashion and textile production technologies; here, it demonstrated the surprising result of pigment printing done in such a way that the texture is built up, resulting in an intriguing 3D effect. The company debuted a furniture collection in collaboration with Niso Furniture, featuring sofas, armchairs, a dining table, and curtains.

MYTH AI, meanwhile, demonstrated the role of generative AI technology for the design of bedding, wall décor, home textiles, and flooring. The company explained that using advanced AI makes the design process faster, more customisable, and less expensive. It also provides design security through blockchain certification and IP protection.

Isidore Bryant

Natural materials undoubtedly played a role at Heimtextile 2025. Their value goes far beyond the fact that a certain irregularity increases the life of a textile (no one would notice a new flaw in a beautifully imperfect piece). But for an example of quirky natural beauty, take Isidore Bryant, a textile design studio founded in 2023 by trained weaver Elizabeth Ballon (and named after her paternal grandfather and maternal great-grandmother). Ballon loves silk, wool, cashmere, cotton, and linen, and she uses two restored vintage looms (as well as computer-generated drafts) to produce tactile textile collections whose appeal is sure to endure.

Libeco

Working with certain natural yarns is comparable to producing wine, according to Libeco, Belgium's largest flax weaving mill and one of Europe's leading linen manufacturers. Climate and soil have an impact on production, especially when it is local and sustainable, as in Libeco’s case. Because its products are completely natural, it explains, they can be buried at the end of their life cycle – from nature to nature. Among other pieces, we loved the new ‘Q581 changeant Laundered’, a bulky textured linen-wool blend with such a soft feel.

Young talents

Among the young winners of the Heimtextil University Contest 2025, we were amazed by Birke-Katharina Weber's research project, MycoColors. It explores the potential of mushrooms as a sustainable source of textile dyes, to replace synthetic colours. Colourants are extracted from the fruiting bodies of existing fungal species and mycelia can be grown in bioreactors under controlled conditions. ‘The goal is to create a constantly expanding palette of colours that can also be applied to other materials,’ says Weber.

Equally brilliant is Silent Canvas, a project by Kateryna Basiuk from Lucerne School of Design, Film and Art. Basiuk investigates how recycled yarns function when used in aesthetically appealing and effectively cushioned circular acoustic absorbers. The concept stems from the ultrasonic-absorbing microstructures of moth wings, which can block predator noise, and whose natural structures are replicated and knitted in recycled materials.

The Rug Republic

This year, Indian brand The Rug Republic launched a new artisanal lighting collection – a selection of decorative lamps made from natural materials. One of the most innovative, and successful, is the ‘Argo Denim’ lamp, as upcycled denim is a symbol of circular supply chains. The company explains that waste denim from around the world is imported into India, stripped of its metals, and the remaining fabric is used to make rugs, pouffes, and lamps.

Edmund Bell

Eureka! Fairs like Heimtextil allow you to discover small and less-known innovations that are often overlooked by laypeople. According to Edmund Bell, a global leader in high-performance fabrics, the concept of a double-sided textured blackout fabric was difficult to obtain for those working in the field due to some technical constraints. At the fair, the company provided an exclusive preview of its solution, called Diversity, which it claims will set a new standard in textured blackout curtains.

Salgado Group

A pillowcase out of milk? When it comes to innovative fibres, Portugal's Salgado Group made headlines at Heimtextil 2025, presenting, among other things, sheets made using the extracted proteins from milk and soya beans, pineapple leaves, and nettle plant stalks. Other sheets contain waste carpet mixed with sustainably sourced wood pulp derived from fast-growing, responsibly managed forests. All, of course, are cotton-blend.

Wall coverings

The Marburger Tapetenfabrik, one of Europe's oldest and most prestigious wallpaper factories, introduced Terra, its first clay-based wallpaper collection. Screen and intaglio printing techniques are used to create its designs, which feature unique clay-based colours sourced locally. As a result, it is plasticiser-free. There has been a lot of interest in the brand's Celsius collection, too, which is a wallpaper that reflects heat rays thanks to aluminum pigments on the surface.

On another note, K'moor presented Cemento – an odd name for environmentally friendly wallpaper – made from an innovative biomass compound. Another option is Flax, which is derived from flax-plant fibres and is completely compostable.

Animal friendly

Attention to animals has made its way into the textile industry in unexpected and intriguing ways. Boyteks, from Turkey, exports its mattress fabrics to over 100 countries each year. This means it is among the first to respond to new trends and needs, and it now has a line of vegan products that, according to the brand, avoid any process that would harm animals at any stage of manufacturing. Its vegan mattress fabric, a success at Heimtextil, is entirely made from plant-based materials.

Another surprise, from Elastron, a well-known supplier for the upholstery industry, was its ‘Chanel’ collection, inspired by the fashion house and produced by the brand Magenta. The specially developed velvet does not tear or scratch easily, and is easier to clean than traditional velvet.

Rug trends

An interesting talk, ‘Crafting tomorrow: Key trends shaping the rug industry’, came from Lucy Upward of Cover magazine, which is dedicated to handmade carpets and textiles for interiors. The trends she touched on spanned from the authenticity of storytelling to the prevalence of dark and warm neutral colours, and the ‘Unexpected Red Theory’, a TikTok trend suggesting that adding a pop of red to a room can make the space feel more interesting and cohesive. And of course, there were AI-designed rugs. Some examples? The 3D textures of Merinos, the layering of Jaipur Rugs, and the use of abstract patterns at Oriental Weavers.

heimtextil.messefrankfurt.com

Since its beginnings in 1944, US furniture maker Emeco has been a champion of sustainable production. Its first-ever product, the Navy chair, was, and still is, made from 80 per cent recycled aluminium. Over the years, Emeco has expanded its material innovations to include reclaimed wood, recycled PET plastic, and polypropylene (not to mention initiatives such as ‘The next 150-year-old chair'), making its recent foray into upholstery a natural progression.

Emeco 'No Foam KNIT'

The present picture is bleak. Most upholstery relies on petrochemical-based foam, adhesives, and synthetic textiles that contribute to pollution, waste, and toxic emissions. Recycling is often impossible due to the mix of materials, with most ending up in landfills or incinerated. To address these issues, Emeco partnered with the Self-Assembly Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to create No Foam KNIT, a fully recyclable, mono-material upholstery textile.

The project, recently showcased at the brand’s Venice Beach headquarters, Emeco House, uses an innovative 3D-knitting technique where the yarn functions as both skin and foam replacement. This soft cushioning, springy structure eliminates assembly waste by removing traditional cut-and-sew processes, and because it is made entirely from a mono-material textile, it is fully recyclable at the end of its life.

Beyond reducing the environmental footprint of upholstery, the technique opens new and exciting possibilities for manufacturing and design in terms of functionality, customisation and aesthetics – Emeco says it’s exploring how this breakthrough could influence both current products and future developments.

‘Since the 3D-knitting technology enables so many different aesthetic expressions, we see potential for numerous uses and applications,’ says Jaye Buchbinder, the brand’s head of sustainability. ‘Emeco’s North Star has always been to make more with less, and that is exactly what No Foam KNIT does. We are excited about the possibilities of this textile innovation and how it can inspire positive change in the furniture industry and beyond.’

selfassemblylab.mit.edu
emeco.net

Erica the shark, Bonnie the hippo, and Monica the gorilla are just some of the snarling fang-toothed creations by Dutch designer Hella Jongerius currently on display at Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn’s New York gallery, Salon 94 Design. Part of a solo exhibition by Jongerius, titled ‘Roped Beings’, the ‘Angry Animals’ ceramics are displayed alongside a series of ‘Bead Tables’ and a collection of experimental ‘Textile Studies’ – three series that challenge traditional ideas about function, craft, and narrative.

Hella Jongerius at Salon 94 Design

Jongerius has long explored the relationship between users and objects, seeking to 'reverse the usual hierarchy between an object’s function and its narrative power’. She believes that greater awareness of the interconnection between all living and non-living things 'is needed and can be healing'. Animals, she says, often act as narrators in her work, bringing these ideas to life.

Glazed in earthy pigments inspired by lichen, the life-size ceramic heads are part of an eight-piece series sculpted in Jongerius’ remote Netherlands studio and fired in a kiln in Arnhem.

She describes wild animals as ‘silent partners’, coexisting with humans but lacking a voice. These open-mouthed heads reflect the anger and frustration of overlooked or endangered wildlife, serving as a metaphor for the ethical challenges of our time. Blending humour and poignancy, Jongerius gives these voiceless creatures a commanding presence.

Debuting at this exhibition, the ‘Bead Tables’ build on her earlier ‘Frog Table’, continuing her exploration of the interplay between function and sculpture.

Available in dining, desk, and console formats, each table features a grid pattern disrupted by porcelain beads and threads. 'The beads and threads act like natural weeds and cause tension,' Jongerius explains, highlighting her fusion of artistic expression and industrial design.

Completing the show, a series of textile experiments is arranged across the gallery’s long white wall. Made in Berlin at the designer’s experimental Jongerius Lab and composed of an intriguing mix of materials, such as silk, tissue paper, and ceramic beads, the samples are made using a revolutionary ‘third thread’ weaving structure, in which the thread alternates as warp and weft.

These works expand upon the 3D weaving Jongerius created for installations at Gropius Bau (2021) and Technical University Netherlands (2023).

'The output of Jongerius’ studio lab – a site of constant production, experimentation, and industrial design – shares centre stage with her more intimate sculptural practice,' notes Salon 94. 'As a gallery platform where art and design commingle, S94 Design is especially filled with wonder and gratitude for this collaboration.'

‘Roped Beings’ runs at Salon 94 until 21 December 2024, Salon 94, 3 E 89th Street,
New York, NY 10128

Bolivian-born textile artist Kenia Almaraz Murillo is rethinking weaving’s traditional reputation with work that zigzags across mediums and references. In her new London art exhibition, Murillo adorns her wall hangings with found, urban objects, from car headlights to motorbike headlamps, brilliantly lit up with curves of neon.

The results are striking, juxtaposing traditional Bolivian materials such as sheep’s and llamas’ wool against the more modern, in a bid to find a balance between the natural and the man-made, the technological and the mythical. It is a tension reflected in the materials themselves, with gold threads from France, dating from the 1920s-1940s, woven with alpaca threads from Bolivia in a mish-mash of textural nods.

‘In my work, each piece bears witness to a specific encounter, whether it be with an animal, a landscape, a star, a myth, a legend, a story,’ says Murillo. ‘My approach is one of paying homage. I have a great admiration for living animals, and the animals of myths and legends. I try to make them come alive through my threads and to almost relive those precise moments when the discovery took place. In a way, I am highlighting the past by making it alive in the present. Talking about these discoveries is, for me, a way of talking about the nature that surrounds us, of becoming aware of the beauty of this Earth and thanking it, to better protect it.’

Murillo was taught how to weave in Paris by artist Simone Prouvé, after moving there from Bolivia at age 11. Returning to Bolivia for the first time at age 16, she reconnected with family, friends and local traditions – creating memories and references that she intertwines throughout her work. ‘My story with weaving began when I saw my mother spread out some "aguayos" (woven cloths) on the ground to have them take a "baño de Sol" (sunbath). That moment was a revelation. I felt like I was meeting my ancestors through their lines, their colours, their patterns.

‘As reflected in the materials, [my] work represents a true meeting between two cultures, but I am also working toward finding an overall balance between natural elements and contemporary elements: the quest for harmony in this area is another important root of my work,’ she adds. ‘I was born in Santa Cruz and grew up in Paris. I think I have always wanted to find a connection somehow between these two cultures. My two homes. I learned weaving in France and this allowed me to reactivate the link with my weaving ancestors in Bolivia. Linking thread and light is a personal signature that allows me to honour ancestral knowledge and connect it with modern technology – making them both more alive than ever.’

Kenia Almaraz Murillo's exhibition, 'Andean Cosmovision', is at London's Waddington Custot, 16 November 2024 - 30 January 2025

waddingtoncustot.com

For centuries, Japanese farmers repaired worn clothing using a handsewing technique known as sashiko, with textile surfaces punctuated by rain-like patterns of countless single stitches. This practice, expressing a unique beauty through utility, is the visual starting point for ‘Ame’, a contemporary textile created by Japanese designer Teruhiro Yanagihara for the Danish company Kvadrat.

‘Ame’ – meaning ‘rain’ in Japanese – is Kvadrat’s first textile-to-textile product, crafted entirely of polyester recycled from fabric waste. Its material modernity is harmonised with the poetry of its concept, with a rhythmic design reflecting a modern reimagining of sashiko through its rain-like stitching.

Ame by Teruhiro Yanagihara for Kvadrat

The textile’s in-between shades were inspired by Japan's traditional colour palette, in which deeply codified tones mirror the quietest changes of the micro-seasons. The shades are harmonised in two layers, in a modern riff on kasane no iro, the traditional art of layering kimono textiles.

‘Ame’ is the latest in a trio of textiles designed by Yanagihara for Kvadrat (following ‘Haku’ and ‘Autumn’) – all three connected through contemporary reimaginings of traditional Japanese ideas combined with the natural beauty of gently nuanced colours.

For Yanagihara, who has studios in both Kobe, southwest Japan, and Arles, southern France, an excavation of the past to create a timeless sense of beauty, combined with meticulous material research and modern craftsmanship, underpin his creations, whether it’s a chair, an interior or a scent.

This is reflected across his borderless designs – from 1616/Arita, a contemporary ceramics brand whose warm minimalism for daily life has placed a community of artisans in southern Japan firmly on the global design map; to the low-key calm of the Tokyo flagship for fashion brand Mame Kurogouchi, whose crafted minimalist interiors, softly flowing and light-filtering, echo the inside of a shell.

Another example is Vague (‘wave’ in French) – Teruhiro Yanagihara Studio’s experimental creative space, with iterations in Kobe and Arles, designed to spatially express its philosophies, with exhibitions, food research, material studies, creative residencies, pop-ups.

Here, Yanagihara talks to Wallpaper* from Vague in Kobe – a serenely expansive and art-scattered space spanning a 1938 former bank, walls cocooned in crafted expanses of tsuchikabe earthen plaster – about textiles, cooking and scenes from daily life.

In conversation with Teruhiro Yanagihara

Wallpaper*: Tell us about the new textile, ‘Ame’.

Teruhiro Yanagihara: The pattern is derived from a traditional stitching technique called sashiko. It’s not a designed pattern – it was created for everyday life. When farmers couldn’t afford to repair kimono, they would collect lots of small pieces of fabric called hagire and stitch them together. Mottainai – this is a key word. It means not wasting anything and it’s an important part of Japanese thinking. It’s about the beauty of valuing objects in daily life – which is very timeless and aligns with the sustainability innovations of Kvadrat.

W*: What was the starting point for the textile series?

TY: When I started collaborating with Kvadrat, I researched the history of textiles – and found a strong connection between European and Japanese materials. Even in terms of a kimono, a textile might come from China, then go to India and on to Europe. I became very interested in the Silk Road, how materials were transported and how everything was connected. This idea led to the first textile Haku and then Autumn. For all three textiles, we also explored Japan’s traditional colour palette.

W*: What is unique about Japan’s traditional colour palette?

TY: The colours are very subtly gradated and reflect the smallest changes in nature. In Japan, even within the four seasons, we have 36 micro-seasons. From light to dark, the colours change very gradually. These are shades taken from nature – rocks, seas, skies, fermentation processes.

W*: Can you share some examples?

TY: Even within ‘grey’ there are many variations. One colour is hai nezumi – a grey mouse colour. Another is hai sakura – the slightly grey shade of cherry blossoms when they start drying. The colour spectrum is like the moon, waxing and waning. With the Kvadrat textiles, we tried to reflect these nuances. Using textiles in a space impacts the whole atmosphere so we wanted to create a soft gradation of colours. There are many in-between colours here that are not usually in development.

W*: Spaces, scents, objects – what connects the many different things that you design?

TY: I often start by imagining a scene in daily life. The first time I visited the factory in Arita, I could instantly imagine a scene in which people were using Arita ceramics on a dining table. It was a very strong mental image – I could see the items being used in real life and then went on to make them.

W*: To what extent do you identify your designs as Japanese?

TY: Until the Kvadrat project, I always tried to design from a global perspective. I was always surprised when people outside Japan said my designs felt Japanese, for example when showing work at Milan Design Week. It wasn’t conscious for me – I thought my designs felt more European. At that point, I didn’t really want to show the Japanese-ness in my designs. But the Kvadrat project was a big turning point. I was able to fully appreciate the depths of Japanese beauty. More importantly, I realised that the traditional Japanese way of thinking is actually very global. Researching kimono, ceramics and textiles, I realised how many things that I thought were purely Japanese were connected to Europe. Everything is connected.

W*: How has this impacted your work?

TY: Now, I’m more interested in the places in-between. We’re working on projects in Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, UK, Taiwan and we’re heading to India soon. We already have two Vague spaces, in Japan and France, with studio team members also based in London, Taiwan and the Netherlands. It’s about researching all the gradients and exploring the connections.

W*: And how about Vague, where we’re sitting now?

TY: We opened Vague in Arles in 2019 and in Kobe last year, to express the philosophy of our designs. Here, our studio is on one floor, alongside an artist residency space. Another floor has a gallery, showrooms, pop-ups, a kitchen and a café. We’ve also made our own natural scent brand, inspired by nature, called Lichen, which is based here. The building is a 1930s bank and artisans used earth from Shigaraki, mixed with sand from a Shiga river and Amami oil, to craft the natural plaster on the walls. We use the same ingredients throughout the spaces, but in different formulations to connect but differentiate between them.

W*: What is the most important element of this space?

TY: The atmosphere – kukan. The air that flows between the rooms is connected. Our design is about the invisible – about feeling as well as seeing. I don’t just design objects, I always try to make a connection with the space. So I want the textiles and the furniture and the atmosphere to all be in harmony and blend into one another.

W*: Finally, what currently inspires you?

TY: It’s always about the local. Just like cooking. We always use local materials. So in India, there is cotton and you dye it with saffron – using local materials to make the end product. In China, there may be another technique to dye textiles, but typically the process has the same roots. It’s like noodles around the world – they have the same roots but change in each region, adapting to the local environment. And the different types of pasta across Italy. Design is similar. It depends on the local ingredients – but ultimately it all has the same foundation.

kvadrat.dk

From the wild expanses of the Khovd Province in Western Mongolia to the botanical oasis of Kew Gardens in west London, a new collaboration between Mongolian-born cashmere designer Oyuna Tserendorj and British architectural designer John Pawson brings together old friends and a shared devotion to sublime simplicity.

The pair have partnered on a cashmere throw collection inspired by Pawson’s 70m-long Lake Crossing (also known as the Sackler Crossing) that meanders through 120m of the Royal Botanical Gardens. Crafted from 100 per cent Mongolian cashmere, the five-piece capsule has been made by the nomad community with whom Tserendorj has directly worked since she started her eponymous ready-to-wear brand, Oyuna, in 2002

John Pawson x Oyuna: how the collaboration came to fruition

'I always say, it’s all architecture, whether it’s a fork, an entire monastery or a throw,' Pawson tells Wallpaper*, regarding his approach to designing textiles as opposed to other mediums. 'At the same time, I have enjoyed the opportunity to focus with such pure energy on matters of colour, tone, pattern, rhythm and texture.'

Their partnership came about instinctively, says Tserendorj, who met Pawson through mutual friends in London over ten years ago. 'I love it when things happen intuitively. I like the process the most; how the collaboration develops, all the work, ideas, and moments relating to creating it.'

This project has been in the works for some time. When it came to choosing an image to translate into abstract patterns for the throws, Pawson initially selected one that Tserendorj had taken of a frozen Tolbo lake in far Western Mongolia on one of her annual trips. But when the first samples arrived, the duo weren’t convinced of the results. 'But we weren’t in a rush,' says Tserendorj. Instead, they turned their attention to Pawson’s celebrated archive and landed on the pathway he completed in 2006 as a stimulus.

As a result, the patterns and elemental colour palette are inspired by the shades and surface textures of the Lake Crossing, along with the cement and slate that Pawson is famed for working with. Meanwhile, the finished pieces celebrate the friends’ shared DNA of architectural lines, pure form, and attention to detail that quietly presents itself and unveils in a sensorial way when encountered.

'I see so much of the thinking that has shaped my own work underpinning Oyuna’s pieces,' says Pawson. 'There are multiple underlying threads of connection. Not in terms of literal correspondence, but thematically… we both understand the defining importance of the material palette.

'Collaborations are very important, they keep the thinking fresh,' he continues. 'It’s always about the scope for genuine exchange [as] design advances through dialogue.'

Each throw, priced at £1,195, may have taken eight to nine hours to be made from cashmere yarn, but the process defines slow luxury and the throws have been conceived – like Pawson’s objects and structures – to be enjoyed for generations.

'The nomads take care of their goats for a whole year, combing 15 to 20 goats’ hair in spring to get enough cashmere for one throw, [working through] the long winters and welcome summers that all [combine to result in] that beautiful natural fibre,' explains Tserendorj. 'If we count that, it took a year to make these throws. [But], if [we consider] the wisdom and tradition of nomads who know how to live at one with the land and the livestock? Then we could say it took centuries.'

John Pawson x Oyuna launches mid-October and is available exclusively from oyuna.com and the OYUNA store, 89 Golborne Road, London.

johnpawson.com

Following the announcement earlier in 2024 of a partnership with Studio Urquiola, Frankfurt's Heimtextil, the world's largest textile fair, has revealed a new collaboration with Alcova Milano – one of the most celebrated (and crowded) design platforms during Milan Design Week – for its Heimtextil Trends 25/26 showcase.

‘The decision stems from how Alcova’s founders, Valentina Ciuffi and Joseph Grima, masterfully blend contemporary art, design, and architecture into inspiring exhibitions and immersive installations,’ says Olaf Schmidt, vice president Textiles & Textile Technologies of the Messe Frankfurt Group, the trade fair and event organiser behind Heimtextil.

With Alcova locations including a defunct cake factory, an abandoned military hospital, and an old villa (see Alcova Milano 2024), what makes the annual event a must-see for Fuorisalone attendees, despite the hectic calendar, is Ciuffi and Grima's ability to discover and transform unconventional venues into long-lasting experiences. ‘This perfectly aligns with our vision of Heimtextil, where trends are not just about forecasting new colours and materials’ says Schmidt. ‘Trends evolve in a dynamic interplay, and by reconnecting with forgotten practices, we can better understand the present and shape the future.’

For Ciuffi and Grima, Heimtextil is not just about forecasting trends – it’s about using textiles as a lens to explore broader cultural, social, and environmental narratives: ‘It’s a space where the past and future collide in a way that feels alive and relevant to how we approach contemporary design.’ Since the beginning, the duo have been intrigued with the opportunity to investigate textiles as cultural identifiers and communicators, rather than as products. They recognise that textiles are intertwined with a variety of stories, including craft, technology, sustainability, and social change.

‘We saw Heimtextil as a platform to curate those narratives, to bring together voices from diverse disciplines, and to challenge how textiles can shape future design practices,’ they say. The challenge was to move beyond the surface of textiles, beyond the materiality and aesthetics, and look at the systems behind them: ‘We wanted to dig deep into the processes that create textiles, the invisible infrastructures, the ethical questions, and the environmental impact. The opportunity came in using this platform to provoke real conversations about sustainability and circularity, and at the same time, to envision new production systems that don't sacrifice beauty,’ say Ciuffi and Grima.

Alcova’s approach to Heimtextil Trends 25/26

The theme ‘Future Continuous’ refers linguistically to the English tense used to describe activities that will be ongoing in the future, but metaphorically, it evokes a continuous process of renewal and transformation inherent in future making, where the past is never fully left behind, but instead re-evaluated and revived: ‘This perpetual motion calls for a new understanding of change, inviting fresh narratives that enable us to interpret the present as both observers of the past and future prognosticators. It reflects Alcova’s experimental approach, where design pieces engage in a powerful dialogue with the surrounding architecture.’

Ciuffi and Grima conducted interviews with designers, textile researchers, and industry leaders from their network to dive deeply into the processes that create textiles. They talked to artist and writer Janis Jefferies, renowned for her pioneering work in textile research; interior designer Ilse Crawford; Christine Ladstätter, innovation manager of outdoor clothing brand Salewa; Dirk Vantyghem, director general of Euratex (European Apparel and Textile Confederation); Simone van der Burg and Lucas Evers, group heads at Amsterdam's interdisciplinary institute WAAG; and with Eugenia Morpurgo, an independent Italian designer researching the impact that production processes have on society.

The conversations spanned from politics and history to data ethics and sustainable agriculture: ‘One of the most unexpected outcomes was realising how deeply intertwined textiles are with systems we don’t often associate them with – like agriculture,’ say Alcova’s duo. ‘These conversations opened up a dialogue about how materials can be more than just commodities: they can be regenerative, ethical, and political. The connection between textiles and farming, for example, sparked new ideas about localised production and the role of natural fibres in shifting away from extractive, oil-based systems.’

The findings of these interviews also had an impact on the colour palette that will be introduced during Heimtextil Trend 25/26, from Naturally Uneven Green to End of Petrol and Imperfect Pink: ‘These colours weave together ideas that balance the interplay between tradition and innovation – natural, unbleached tones meet dynamic, vibrant hues, reflecting the ongoing tension between the past and the future,’ says Schmidt.

New trends will be presented also in terms of materials, building processes, and textile design: ‘You can expect a strong presence of natural fibres like linen, hemp, and flax, complemented by cutting-edge innovations such as lab-grown textiles and bio-based materials,’ say Ciuffi and Grima. ‘The Trend Arena installation at Heimtextil will be a striking narrative element, nodding to the behind-the-scenes of textile production, transforming the unseen processes into a source of inspiration and surprise’.

Heimtextil 2025 will be held from 14-17 January 2025, heimtextil.messefrankfurt.com

Since the early days of military regalia, displays of social standing have adorned a specific part of the body: the left breast. Emblems and medals were worn over this spot because – for left-to-right readers – that’s where our gaze tends to land. Modern brands have continued this attention-grabbing tradition, and commonly opt to position their logos on garments in the same place, which also happens to be over the heart. Brand affiliation immediately presents to others something about who we are (or who we aspire to be), and logos have therefore become intrinsically linked with identity and self-expression. So the left breast is effectively prime advertising real-estate for ourselves.

Elizabeth Radcliffe’s beguiling tapestries

It’s this phenomenon that Scottish artist Elizabeth Radcliffe explores via a series of tapestries that hone in on this area of the body, depicting the logos and wordmarks of apparel brands upon their wearer – but without giving away anything else about them. She renders the same 17.7in by 11.4in corner of the body – from neck to ribs; breastbone to shoulder – through the ancient artform of wool weaving, showing contemporary cultural signifiers through a medium more commonly associated with the medieval period.

Radcliffe’s inquiry into the significance of branded attire began four decades ago with waxed motorcycle jackets and workwear, but has recently shifted to tennis apparel, recognising activewear’s rise to cultural dominance as the preferred vessel of self-expression for younger generations. 'In each, a garment points to the sartorial sensibility of its wearer, and provides a set of material conditions that form the basis of Radcliffe’s inquiry,' says a statement from New York gallery Margot Samel, which is hosting a solo exhibition of the artist’s work at its space in Tribeca – her first in the US, and which conveniently opened during the US Open tennis competition.

Radcliffe’s tapestries are mounted on the gallery’s stark white walls, extrapolated from any context for examination in a neutral, abstract setting. Each of the pieces that depict iconic tennis wear, including a Lacoste polo shirt with its stylised crocodile, are presented widely spaced apart in a row at the approximate height they would be on the wearer. The older works are hung opposite, also side by side, allowing the viewer to draw immediate comparisons between them. All show the pleats of fabric, the buttons, zippers, stitching and the logos themselves in realistic detail, and are strikingly different in colour.

The exhibition also includes other works by Radcliffe in the same medium. Two larger tapestries display full figures, both seated and with their faces identifiable. The first is a portrait from 2015 of fellow Edinburgh-based artist Marc Camille-Chaimowicz, relaxed in an armchair and wearing a fedora and chequered trousers. His casual cross-legged pose and the warm red and beige palette contrast with the other full portrait, created in 2012 and depicting artist Youngjoo Yoo, who is perched somewhat uncomfortably on a stool and rendering primarily in dark grey and desaturated hues. Both silhouettes are mounted off the ground, suspended against the sea of white, again removing their original context, in order to be examined without distraction.

Finally, another new work shows a cat laid on a vintage patterned rug, linking back to the common association between domesticity and traditions like weaving, a theme that recurs in Radcliffe’s work – in some cases more blatantly than others.

It’s notable that each of the tapestries requires hundreds of hours of studied, repetitive weaving to complete; they serve as acts of dedication that memorialise moments in her life, as well as in wider culture. Also striking is Radcliffe’s application of trompe l’oeil effects through intricate craftwork, giving her pieces a weird presence – evoking both a humorous and a slightly eerie feeling when you view them in the flesh. ‘Meticulously picturing the world using the interplay of the warp and the weft serves as a way of elevating it, but is also a means of signalling ownership of one’s own time,' the gallery says.

Elizabeth Radcliffe's exhibition runs until 12 October 2024 at Margot Samel, New York

You’d be forgiven for thinking that ceramics have little in common with wallpaper and textiles. However there’s a shared alchemy at play in the processes that bring these practices to life. They all deal with organic matter – earth, wood pulp, fibres – each material undergoes a process of transformation via mind, hand and machine, to produce the layers and objects that soften the edges of our interior lives and worlds. We are living in times of experimental creative commingling, on a quest to discover what we might learn from introducing the skills and insights of people with different sectoral and cultural experiences into traditionally siloed practices. And the results can be surprising, innovative and joyful, as ceramicist Henry Holland’s range of wallpaper and textile collections for Harlequin (launching 6 August) bears testament.

Holland closed his riotous and irreverent London-based fashion label House of Holland in 2020. He hung up his scissors and turned his attention to clay, subsequently and quickly forging a cult following for his ceramics practice at Henry Holland Studio, based in Hackney. It was during the pandemic, with his local pottery studio shuttered, that Holland began experimenting with the Japanese technique of Nerikomi – folding and slicing clay, which is then built by hand into objects that take on a distinct marbling effect. Holland’s Nerikomi-inspired signature has in turn translated into a textural motif that lends itself with beauty and intrigue to the papers and textiles in his Harlequin collaboration.

Beyond the more explicit derivation, Holland’s Harlequin ranges are a masterclass in mood texture and mood. Harlequin is a Sanderson house that celebrates colour and pattern with a contemporary zing, and Holland has both softened and augmented these tenets in various techniques. There is a richness here for the eyes and hands, thanks to a playful approach to combining printing and weaving techniques within a distinctly earthy, tonal palette. The results are evocative and accessible, expressive without being overbearing. They cater for and reflect the current penchant for patterned interiors that feel crafted and integrated, neither superficial nor superimposed. We’ve come to think of this as a Millennial x Bloomsbury revival.

The papers and textiles are on sale from today, and their beauty speaks for itself. That said, we wanted to find out more about Holland’s involvement, so we put a few questions to him, which he gamely answers below...

Henry Holland on the making of his collection for Harlequin

W*: Swapping clay for wallpaper and textiles must have been an interesting challenge – how has your process as a potter informed your design process here?

Henry Holland: Working on the wallpaper and textile collection with Harlequin was a fascinating departure from working in clay as we had so many more options available. While our ceramics are really tactile and have a texture of their own, it's still very uniform across our portfolio and the pattern is all created below the glaze.

W*: Did your fashion industry background help with the process of textile manufacture?

HH: For this collection I drew from my background in fashion, especially when working with the textiles, but also a lot of the wall coverings have a fabric texture created using an embossing technique. I had some knowledge from my years working with fabric mills, creating my own custom cloths, but this collection presented a whole new challenge, working into two categories for both upholstery and drapery, which meant learning the qualities that the different collections needed to encompass – not to mention learning about the all-important fabric rub count for upholstery. I was really engaged and fascinated by the whole process and when it came to working with the wallpapers, the team at Harlequin were able to guide me through and execute my ideas of adding textures through different printing and embossing techniques.

W*: How do you describe the different moods of the collections?

HH: The colour palette is intentionally really tight within the collection, which allows it to be used in myriad combinations. We used really neutral bases of oatmeal and off-white – never stark white – with a ‘Chocolate Black’ brown – never the stark coldness of a true black. I think this creates a very calming mood throughout the collection and the tactility of the texture within it – both for the walls and the fabrics – creates a cocooning feeling of sanctuary when they’re used in the home. I've recently renovated my own house using a lot of the collection and it has really created a much-needed safe sense of calm for me and my husband.

W*: What is your most significant discovery or learning from the collaboration?

HH: The constant learning is the best thing about my job, whether it's learning about new printing and embossing techniques for the wallpapers, or different weaving techniques like crewel, appliqué and boucle for the fabrics. I'm self-taught in everything I've ever done, which definitely has its drawbacks, but one of the positives is that with every new project comes a process of learning and discovery and I love that – it's what gets me going!

Harelquin.sandersongroupdesign.com

Tanya Aguiñiga knows a thing or two about living in flux. From the age of four, each morning at 3.30am, she travelled across the US-Mexico border from her home in Tijuana to her school in San Diego. ‘It’s crazy, logistically. But it’s also crazy, psychologically and emotionally,’ she tells me via Zoom from her LA studio, with off-white fibre works dangling from the half-moon wall behind her. ‘At the time, kind of similar to now, there were massive amounts of migrants at the border up against the fence trying to get to the US side. We had to navigate pretty difficult experiences on our way. There was incredible desperation on the faces of adults, and as a child, it’s super difficult to deal with.’

At the age of 18, Aguiñiga moved in with her grandmother in San Diego and settled in the US. ‘In a lot of our border towns, you’re constantly part of whatever journeys people are on. Mostly, that involves people’s really tragic journeys to get to the border,’ says the artist, who, because she was born in the US, was able to cross freely. ‘I constantly thought about my privilege, and I had a lot of guilt for being able to cross back and forth. It does, obviously, shape who you become.’

Aguiñiga’s wide-ranging practice spans sculpture, furniture and fashion design, immersive installations, performance, and community-based projects. Her art is far
from a solitary pursuit; her studio of seven years, a Second World War Quonset hut in LA’s Elysian Valley, has become a meeting point of sorts, for workshops, craft fairs, and to exhibit the work of other artists, particularly those marginalised.

‘When I came to see it, I thought it was the most amazing studio space I had ever seen, she says. ‘People are always like: “Are you in a spaceship?”’ Overlooking the LA River, it sits within a hive of activity, but not the sort you might expect for an incubator of cross-border creativity. ‘It's hard to ignore that I'm in a tow yard,’ says Aguiñiga. ‘I can hear arguments when people come to pick up their cars. The cops are usually here once a week to pick up stolen cars. There's a lot of tow yard activity.’

From a young age, Aguiñiga felt a sense of duty to give back to her community. At the age of 19, while in community college, she met her mentor, Michael Schnorr, a member of activist art collective, Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, which, founded in 1984, sought to give voice to those at the politically charged meeting point of two countries. Aguiñiga witnessed how art could be used to bridge communities, alter narratives and empower change, and she began making collaborative installations with the group. ‘That immediately just exploded my head open,’ she recalls. ‘I had no idea that you could use art to help people.’ 

Aguiñiga first studied art at San Diego State University before going on to study furniture design at the Rhode Island School of Design, a decision informed by a desire to create something that was – as opposed to art – practical, and justifiable to her parents who had made sacrifices to facilitate her education. But then she began immersing herself in different craft-based processes. In 2007, she travelled through Mexico – from Oaxaca to the Mayan communities in Chiapas – to absorb the country’s ancient and multifarious history of ancestral craft that existed long before Spanish colonisation of the Americas. 

Informed by her experiences, Aguiñiga realised she had a choice: to use ‘comfortable’ European weaving technologies, or liberate her work from all that Western education had taught her, to ‘decolonise’ her practice. ‘After learning how to backstrap loom weave, I had a massive revelation: I was like “the body and materials are connected, and the material is a witness to whatever emotional or physical state the body is going through, the tension is recorded”,’ she recalls. 

Aguiñiga then began thinking about the ties we have to objects and territories,
and how art can be deployed as an accessible tool for protest, activism and community building. In 2016, Aguiñiga founded AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), a platform that spotlights the experiences of binational artists. Although the non-profit AMBOS mostly operates in Tijuana, and Aguiñiga’s own practice within her LA studio, the two are fundamentally interwoven. 

‘We fund AMBOS through the making of pretty things here,’ says Aguiñiga, who is currently co-ordinating two ceramic studios at LGBTQ asylum shelters in Tijuana through the initiative. ‘I’m thinking not just about what art can do, but what it’s for and who gets to participate,’ she says, noting the deeply-rooted, often class-based hierarchies in arts education. ‘It’s very rare that somebody who’s self-taught makes it this far. The language is exclusionary, the spaces are exclusionary, the skill levels for certain things are exclusionary, so I’m constantly trying to think of how I can knock down barriers. A lot of that comes from growing up on the border and how there are limits that people set on us. We shouldn’t have boundaries on our creativity.’

Earlier this year, Aguiñiga was one of 30 finalists selected for the 2023 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, and currently features in the prize’s exhibition at the Noguchi Museum, New York. It was something of a journey to get here. ‘I think I’ve applied maybe four times to the craft prize, and never make it in!’ Aguiñiga quips. ‘I was like, oh, the [projects] that get in are about mastery of skill. Connection to culture, yes, but mastery, that’s where I keep messing up! I was sending in stuff that was too loaded.’ Her shortlisted entry is Matriarchal Womb, which combines a deft command of materials with the cultural depth synonymous with the artist’s multifaceted practice. ‘

Matriarchal Womb skilfully layers textiles from distinct craft lineages, from crochet to coiling, as a metaphor for the bonds that exist between families and within communities. ‘It’s an intricate and poignant work’, says Jonathan Anderson, creative director of Loewe. 

Like many of Aguiñiga’s fibre works (including those currently on view in a solo exhibition at Chicago’s Volume Gallery), Matriarchal Womb uses off-loom woven, undyed cotton to signify the interconnected non-hierarchical relationships within communities. The knotted fibre, dipped in self-drying Mexican terracotta, represents ancient forms of communication in Mesoamerica, Aguiñiga’s own identity, and what it means to ‘have more brown objects in a very white space’. But at its core, the piece is about motherhood, womanhood and nurture. ‘In the beginning, it was about making spaces of care,’ she says. ‘I didn’t think I was going to make me and my daughter.’

Aguiñiga emphasises the importance of such prizes in broadening the conversation around global craft, and defending its validity as a device for storytelling against capitalism and hyper-commodification. ‘It’s important for people to know how many of us are still making stuff’, she concludes. ‘And that we care about craft, but also connecting with each other globally through what our hands can do.’ By carving space for non-hierarchical making, decolonised craft and borderless creativity, she is developing a practice that encompasses her own, and the voices of many, in pain, joy and solidarity. 

A version of this article appears in the July 2023 issue of Wallpaper*, on newsstands now and available to subscribers. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Matriarchal Womb is on show as part of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize exhibition at the Noguchi Museum, New York, until 18 June, craftprize.loewe.com

Swallowing Dirt is on view at Volume Gallery, Chicago, until 17 June, wvvolumes.com, tanyaaguiniga.com 

Louis Barthélemy is no stranger to dualities. His new exhibition ‘Mbër Yi / The Wrestlers’ at the Théodore Monod African Art Museum in Dakar reflects, as he tells Wallpaper*, ‘a powerful communion of intertwined bodies with nature’. He explores an ‘omnipresent duality between light and dark, life and death, mastery and abandonment in the game’.

The multidisciplinary artist and designer moved to Cairo in 2017 and has a deep commitment to the preservation and revival of traditional crafts threatened by globalisation. As is typical of his tapestry work, this new series mixes, he says, ‘different cultural influences: the rites and symbols of Senegalese wrestling, the dexterity of Egyptian know-how in the realisation of the “Khayamiya” hangings, responding to the tapestries, also appliquéd [and found in the museum], from the kingdom of Danhomè, together linked by the particular interest I have in the exercise of colour, drawing and for humankind’.

It was a trip to Dakar in 2019 that inspired the conception of ‘Mbër Yi / The Wrestlers’. Curious about Senegalese wrestling (làmb in Wolof) and the mystical beliefs tied to it, Barthélemy approached a wrestler on the beach and forged a relationship. ‘I would meet the wrestlers at sunset each evening of my stay to observe their training programme and was allowed to visually document it with my camera,’ he says. ‘These moments spent with the wrestlers allowed me to better understand their condition, their aspiration, and the universe in which they evolve. A universe steeped in sacredness, the sublime, respect for ancestors and the forces of nature’.

The result is a move away from his usual style. The artist, who has previously worked with the likes of Christian Louboutin, Maison Pierre Frey and Balineum, describes ‘the movement during the fight creating a profusion of colours shifting on the sand track’, inviting him to ‘drift away from the figurative which predominantly defines my work and explore the abstract’. 

During his stay, Barthélemy browsed the markets and collected a range of bazin – a shiny woven fabric often used in traditional Senegal dress. He had the desire to rework the pieces back in Cairo for his Khayamiya tapestries, a type of appliquéd textile used historically to create decorated tents in the Middle East. However, the closing of borders during Covid-19 limited his choices. ‘I did play around initially [with] the colour palette I had brought to Cairo from Dakar. I enjoy having restrictions that can frame the creative process. It allows [me] to make decisions and be resourceful.’

When borders reopened, Barthélemy was able to purchase further pieces of bazin in Goutte d’Or, the West African area of Paris, in the 18th arrondissement. He sourced the fabrics from a popular manufacturer called Getzner, and took them back to Egypt to create the tapestries. 

Through his creations, Barthélemy, who divides his time between Marrakesh, Cairo and Paris, aims to celebrate intercultural communication and encourage ‘opening up to others’. ‘The series stitches a thread from Cairo to Dakar and dialogues with [the heritage of textiles] made on both sides of the African continent, all commissioned and produced in the past to convey power and spiritual messages.’

Louis Barthélemy’s ‘Mbër Yi / The Wrestlers’ will continue at the Théodore Monod African Art Museum (IFAN) in Dakar until March 2023. A second iteration will be staged at MCC Gallery in Marrakech from the 28 April 2023, including new appliquéd tapestries produced in Cairo, drawings and a performance. louisbarthelemy.com

2022 was the year of Cecilia Vicuña. In April, the Chilean artist was honoured with the 59th Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and she was the subject of a major show at New York’s Guggenheim. In October, this series of triumphs culminated in Brain Forest Quipu, the Chilean artist's epic Hyundai Commission for Tate Modern. 

Brain Forest Quipu, which has just been named Best Art Installation in the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2023, is a majestic, two-sculpture installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall that blends fibre art and ancient South American communication systems to explore ecology, community and social justice.

In an interview last year, Vicuña explained how the ‘very visceral, fantastic response’ to her monumental installation, Quipu Womb (2017), which debuted at Documenta 14 and was recently acquired by Tate, was part of the reason she was selected for the coveted Turbine Hall commission. 

As Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern explained last year, ‘Vicuña has been an inspirational figure for half a century, championing concerns of ecology, community and social justice which grow ever more urgent today. Her radical textile sculptures combine pressing political messages with stunning visual form, creating a truly unforgettable experience for the viewer – one that resonates with and connects audiences all around the world. Recognition of Vicuña's powerful work is long overdue and I'm thrilled that she'll be bringing fibre art to the heart of Tate Modern for the first time.’

Given Vicuña's historical entanglement with London, where she lived in political exile in the 1970s, her Tate commission offers a sense of coming full circle. ‘I have a love for London, where everything was so difficult and beautiful at the same time. The Turbine Hall, in particular, feels like a park, like a public space, and people use it that way. I’m fascinated by that because that’s the origin of my art,’ she told us. ‘Whatever I do in the Turbine Hall will continue that spirit of complete fluidity of the public space. Even though it’s inside the museum, people take it differently, perhaps because it’s an industrial space, it belongs to everybody. Experiencing – not telling, but sensing, feeling – is the most powerful way of transmission.’

Cecilia Vicuña, Brain Forest Quipu, Hyundai Commission, until 16 April 2023, Tate Modern, London, tate.org.uk

The winners of the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2023 are revealed in the February 2023 issue, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Faith Ringgold is an artist with a humble manner, though her impact on art history is nothing of the sort. Born in Harlem, NY, in 1930, Ringgold is amongst the most important political artists of our time. With powerful, emblematic narratives, she has spent five decades uncovering the many subjectivities of history, challenging historic stereotypes and false truths of African-American identity, championing underrepresented narratives and drawing attention to gender inequality. Ringgold’s bold, indelible impact on art history and the lives of Black Americans, Black women and Black people more widely can never be erased. 

With a major retrospective now on view at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, Ringgold is gratified by the recent response to her work. ‘My mother always said I would have to work twice as hard to go half as far. I believed in myself – as my family did – and just kept working no matter what the response was. I am delighted to see my work appreciated by so many,’ says the artist, whose work is framed intellectually from her position in the Harlem Renaissance. 

Ringgold’s work in narrative quilting has made her a pioneer of the medium. Her ‘story quilts’ are actually paintings – acrylic on canvas – with pieced fabric borders. Unduly associated with craft, the medium has been adopted into the narrative of contemporary art in more recent times. Though Ringgold did not consider herself a pioneer at the time. ‘Throughout my professional life I felt free to do whatever I wanted to do – and use whatever material was suitable for my vision. I felt no limitation.’ 

As well as her tapestries, her narrative scenes – such as the American People series, the focus of the de Young exhibition – confront race relations in 1960s America. A mural-scale painting concludes the series, culminating in violent chaos with the riots that were erupting throughout the country. Fighting in the streets and the undocumented killings of African-American people were frequent. Blood is drawn and spatters evenly; the struggle touches all. Done-up, buttoned businessmen represent the core of the struggle; a battle amongst the middle class for the surety of their social positioning. 

‘The images I created reflect my experiences and what was going on around me. In the 1960s, I embraced the civil rights movement because Black artists were being overlooked. In the 1970s I embraced the women’s movement because female artists were ignored more than men. I think the same issues are relevant today.’ Many of the key works of the Black Arts Movement were solely focused on Black masculinity, and this often threatened to drown out the voices and messages of Black women artists of the movement. Indeed, Ringgold would come to realise, after joining, that the movement would serve to give men power over women. Ringgold’s work is an expression of freedom, as an African-American, as a woman, and above all else as a Black woman.

‘I hope people will be inspired by my art and find the courage as I did to do whatever they feel moved to do – whether it’s in art, science or any discipline. It takes courage to be free and express one’s own vision. Everyone is important and has a unique story to tell.’ 

We are living in an age where purpose is being reinvented and historical narratives are being uncovered and afforded due attention. How far have we come and how much farther do we have to go? To this, Ringgold muses ‘We have made progress to a certain extent but there is a long journey ahead. There is much work to do before our society attains true social justice. These past few years have exposed the extent of prejudice in our society. There is a lot of catching up to do before there is true equity.’

Ringgold allows us to believe in the possibility of freedom; her work is deeply personal yet universal. It unravels an experience shared by many through her unique perspective. It can be said that some of the best art is made through the exploration of one’s own experience. Ringgold agrees: ‘It is essential for an artist to find their voice. What distinguishes a great artist from a mediocre one is their artistic vocabulary. One may be influenced or inspired by another artist's vision, but finding one’s own distinct voice is the goal. You cannot make art about anything you haven’t experienced.’ Ringgold’s work draws you in because faith is at the centre; to look at her multifaceted oeuvre is to enter a relationship with history, her story and your own.

Ringgold is rightly credited with expanding the American story; but at the core of her work, her own deeply nuanced story resonates, a story for us all to share. Art is a unique expression of life, and Ringgold's expression urges us to take notice of a bigger story, more American People, and a more expansive humanity. 

'Faith Ringgold: American People', until 27 November 2022 at the de Young Museum, San Francisco. deyoung.famsf.org

Textile artists have long used their medium as a vehicle for storytelling. Much like ceramic art, it has long trodden the foggy line between art and craft. It comes dressed in many forms: fibre art, tapestry, weaving, embroidery, knitting, and often spreads beyond the borders of art into fashion, design, science and technology. 

The last century has seen a renaissance in thread-based art. It was only during the Bauhaus years in the early 20th century that textiles began to enter the vocabulary of modern art, a move indebted to textile masters like Anni Albers, who turned her weaving loom into a vehicle for innovation. Albers saw the potential of textiles beyond a ‘women’s craft’ and has since influenced swathes of creatives including Sheila Hicks, who studied under both Anni and Josef Albers and myriad fashion designers. Other artists who took textiles to new heights in the 20th century include Sonia Delaunay, Judith Scott, and Louise Bourgeois.

In the 1970s, coinciding with the women's liberation movement, and the rise of feminist art, textiles underwent its own revolution. Fibre art was born: textiles was catapulted beyond the domestic space and unshackled from veiled art world snobbery. The medium took on a life beyond functional craft; it became textiles for textiles’ sake.

From immersive site-specific installations to work that reinterprets the codes of history, contemporary textile art is a conceptual and political tool, fuelled by postmodernist ideals and the experimental spirit of those who command it. 

Ibrahim Mahama

In his home country of Ghana, Ibrahim Mahama's contemporary art centre provides the social infrastructure for arts education; in his exhibitions internationally, he cultivates a collaborative focus. Recently, Mahama has unveiled possibly his greatest collaborative work - and certainly his largest scale public commission - in the UK yet. Purple Hibiscus, exhibited over the exterior of the Barbican, named after Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2003 novel, encompasses around 2000 square metres of billowing panels of pink and purple fabric, woven and sewn in collaboration with hundreds of craftspeople from Tamale in Ghana. On the panels, around 100 batakaris have been embroidered - robes traditionally worn by both ordinary people as well as northern Ghanaian royals - which Mahama has been collecting over the years, without at first knowing for what purpose. 

The project is a natural extension of his fascination with materials, building on previous work which saw him reflect on global exchange, communism and colonialism through jute bags. He became interested in their physical journey - originally created in India and Bangladesh, they became useful for the transmission of cocoa and became a commodity themselves, becoming stained and ripped and stitched back together. The transformation began a new life cycle triggered by human intervention. 

Writer: Hannah Silver

Rachel Scott

Rachel Scott’s approach to textile art is one of pure dedication. In her Pimlico studio, mornings are spent weaving and evenings are devoted to spinning wool for the next day. Since she started weaving in 1976, her wide-ranging practice has comprised everything from handwoven rugs and knitted patchwork-covered chairs to cushions, bags, scarves, dresses and even chess sets in her signature earthen palette and angular patterning. In a new show, 'weaving my world' at Make Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, Scott offers a snapshot of her prolific textile output, as well as early paintings dating from the 1960s. In addition to Scott‘s work, the exhibition will feature pieces by her husband, Frank Bowling and her daughters, Marcia and Iona Scott. As Scott says: ‘Making things by hand for me is the only way and has been since I was a child. What else would I do with my time?’

Richard McVetis

Repetition, ritual, rhythm and obsession, British textile artist Richard McVetis’ work has long been concerned with the subtle differences that arise in habitual, labour intensive making. His ‘Variations of a Stitched Cube’, shortlisted for the 2018 Loewe Craft Prize, examine the systems in which we measure time. These distinctive, often three-dimensional and cubic textile works seek to record human presence, time and decay through meticulous stitching, making a portrait of both the artist and the broader human condition. 

Sanford Biggers 

American artist Sanford Biggers draws connections between apparently disparate cultural practices and examines current socio-political events while unearthing the contexts that conceived them. Biggers’ works reference African American history, ongoing police brutality against Black Americans, and Buddhist spiritualism. The Harlem-based artist’s work spans film, performance, music and sculpture, and he has frequently turned to textile art to explore new narratives, with his quilt pieces often originating as antique heirlooms, which he acquires and alters. As the artist explained of the works: ‘My embellishment, erasure, defacement, and repair complicates the provenance and gender of these relics of Americana. They are remixed, chopped and screwed but their softness is ultimately their power.’ 

Faig Ahmed 

The work of Azerbaijani artist Faig Ahmed is interwoven with complex layers of historical, literary, mystical, and craft. He is best known for surreal, often psychedelic twists to traditional Islamic rugs. His carpets – like optical illusions in textile form – warp, melt, pixelate, unravel, and appear to spill from the wall and onto the floor like intricate pools of liquid. Despite the contemporary interventions, the artist’s textile art is created by skilled practitioners who follow traditional Azerbaijani weaving techniques. Ahmed, who represented Azerbaijan at the Venice Biennale in 2007, presented three new carpet works in his solo show, ‘Pir’ at Sapar Contemporary, New York. Each work is titled after poets and spiritual masters whose works had a lasting influence on the cultural history of Azerbaijan: Shams Tabrizi, Yahya al-Shirvani al-Bakuvi, and Nizami Ganjavi. 

Tanya Aguiñiga

Textile artist Tanya Aguiñiga, now based in Los Angeles, spent a childhood in Tijuana, Mexico. During this time, she travelled several hours each day across the border to attend school in San Diego, an experience that would go on to have a profound impact on her work. Her furniture, textiles, wearable pieces, sculptures, and site-specific installations involve a spectrum of natural materials, from beeswax to human hair and stitch together complex ideas of gender and nationality. Beyond her individual practice, Aguiñiga frequently collaborates with artists and activists to create sculptures, installations, performances, and collective community-based art projects. These ‘performance crafting’ happenings explore notions of divided, transnational identities, political and human rights issues at the US-Mexico border, and the power of art to weave communities together.

Sheila Hicks

Sheila Hicks’ name is almost synonymous with fibre art. Over more than half a century, she has removed the seams between art, architecture and design with bold, groundbreaking work, often dominating public spaces. The American artists’ extensive travels across several continents and studies of vernacular textile traditions informed an expansive, yet unmistakable practice that ranges from intricate wall hangings (or ‘minimes’) to cascades of vibrant fabric balls and maximal site-specific installations which envelop viewers and overwhelm senses. Hicks’ work draws on everything from Peruvian and Bolivian archaeological sites to pre-Columbian textiles. She was also deeply inspired by her former Yale tutor Josef Albers’ approach to colour and the pioneering structures in the work of his wife, Anni Albers. American design firm Knoll became one of Hicks’s first major commercial clients; together they created Inca, inspired by Andean patterns. In Hicks’ work, textile art is sculpture, painting, architecture and an independent discipline in its own right. 

Chiharu Shiota

Chiharu Shiota's elaborate entanglements are difficult to forget and easy to get lost in. Her labyrinthine installations are vast, surreal waves of blood-red, black or white threads, and appear almost as though humans could weave webs. Within these environments, the Japanese, Berlin-based artist often traps objects of personal significance such as clothes, keys, boats, suitcases, and even herself. Shiota’s work is deeply rooted in performance art; the artist studied under Marina and holds a deep affinity with late Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta. Her textile installations are both performative and painterly; as the artist told us, ‘The single line of thread is like a line in a painting. With the thread, I am drawing in the air, in an unlimited space. With the material, I can create new spaces. They might be deconstructed after the exhibition, but they will live in the memory of the visitors forever.’ 

Billie Zangewa

South African–Malawian artist Billie Zangewa is well known for creating moving stories of femininity, domesticity, motherhood and the exploitation of the Black female body rendered in delicate hand-stitched fragments of raw silk. Within these scenes, often figurative, urban and referencing themes of everyday life, Zangewa explores gender stereotypes and socio-political notions around the undervaluing of women’s labour. Through self-portraiture, the artist also critically confronts the male gaze, and conversely, explores what a female gaze on womanhood might look like. 

Gabriel Dawe 

Best known for his dazzling Plexus series, Mexican artist Gabriel Dawe is well versed in pushing textile art to its extremities. His vast installations explore the intersection of fashion, architecture and optical illusion. Dawe takes the core component of clothing, and augments it on an architectural scale, creating hypnotic work which seems to make the tangible appear intangible. The artist uses ordinary polyester embroidery threads to create extraordinary illusions which resemble something close to vivid, laser projections. Beneath his work's obvious aesthetic appeal, Dawe speaks to something deeper: the human need for shelter and protection, and the hyper-masculine ideals prevalent in Mexican culture. gabrieldawe.com

Anna Ray

Anna Ray has a knack for harnessing the emotive power of her materials. Through large-scale, handmade work and avid experimenting, she blurs the boundaries between the two- and three-dimensional with wall-based pieces that almost assume the quality of sculptural reliefs. Predominantly fibre-based, the artist’s work spans silk, cotton, velvet, wool and paper, often using humble, domestic materials such as a sewing machine, scissors, pliers and a needle. Earlier this year, Ray became the second recipient of the Brookfield Properties Crafts Council Collection Award at Collect 2021. The artist charmed the judges with her ability to exude joy, optimism and energy through her sculptural works. As part of the award, her striking pieces, Capture and Weave (made during and directly after the first UK Covid-19 lockdown) was exhibited at 99 Bishopsgate and Aldgate Tower in summer and autumn 2021.

Diedrick Brackens

Texas-born Diedrick Brackens’ rich tapestries interweave personal stories, American history and narratives of African American and queer identities. Fusing techniques and traditions from West African weaving, quilting from the American South and European tapestry-making, he creates intricate, often vibrantly-coloured visions of history, folklore and contemporary American life. Created in hand-dyed cotton, his pieces are charged with a consciousness of the material’s complex and barbaric history. Since receiving the revered Studio Museum in Harlem’s Joyce Alexander Wein Prize in 2018 (an honour previously awarded to the likes of Simone Leigh, Lorna Simpson and Glenn Ligon), the artist has become a pivotal figure in the contemporary fibre art renaissance.

Amsterdam-based textile studio Byborre was founded by Borre Akkersdijk in 2010 in an attempt to innovate in the field of knitwear; in the years since, it has done just that, developing not only its own trailblazing textiles – collaborating with Adidas, BMW, Nike, North Face and more, as well as creating its own clothing collections – but also offering tools for customers to create their own bespoke fabrics with properties like UV protection, odour resistance and intricate colour blends through platform Byborre Create (‘a Photoshop for textiles,’ as Akkersdijk has previously described). Supply-chain transparency, anti-waste technology and the development of a ‘sustainable eco-system’ are central to Byborre’s philosophy. 

Released this week, the latest addition to Byborre’s growing profile of design offshoots is Textiles, a selection of ready-to-order fabrics designed by the brand’s in-house team utilising the innovative knitting techniques that are the foundations of the label. Comprising 17 styles in total crafted from completely traceable materials, the aim is to allow easy access to Byborre’s sustainably-minded designs. ‘Textiles makes it even easier for professionals to design better products with better textiles,’ says the brand in a statement, ‘allowing professionals from apparel to interior, architecture, and project development to work with Byborre’s textiles instantly.’

Byborre launches ready-to-order Textiles

Styles span knitting techniques (rib, intarsia, 3D-knit, among others), innovations (notably, OTW spinning technology, which helps prevent pilling and abrasion) and colourways (over 50 can be selected in total), while recycled nylons and polyesters are utilised throughout. Each style can be ordered for delivery in just ten days, arriving with a ‘textile passport’ that ensures a fully transparent supply chain from raw material to the final fabric. The aim is for this ready-to-order library to continue to expand over the coming months and years.

‘Byborre Textiles is a testimony of what we have learned about knit and textiles over the past decades,’ says Akkersdijk. ‘By listening to and learning from creators, we better understand what they need to use more responsible textiles in their products. This led us to Textiles as the perfect extension of Create. The Textiles library is ever-growing and will contain a wide range of options, varying from textiles that form the base of your product collection to the ones serving as its eyecatcher.’

byborre.com

Nick Cave describes himself as an ‘artist, educator and messenger’. For more than 20 years, he has used sculpture, installation, performance, video and sound to create spaces of memorial, from collecting found objects to express the impact of gun violence in the United States, to fashioning fantastical Soundsuits, first made in response to the 1991 police beating of Rodney King, which conceal the wearer’s shape and identity as a comment on notions of race, gender and class.

It has been a busy year for Cave, even by his prolific standards. In May, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago unveiled his first career-spanning survey. The exhibition, which travels to the Guggenheim in New York in November, not only features unseen additions to the Soundsuits series, but also rarely seen early works. Its title, ‘Forothermore’, is a neologism that honours those living their lives as ‘other’, and reflects Cave’s deep commitment to creating space for the marginalised, particularly working class communities and queer people of colour. 

Cave has consistently pushed the boundaries of what constitutes art and where it can be exhibited. Also in May, the artist revealed two monumental mosaics in Manhattan, at the 42nd Street connector between the Times Square and Bryant Park subway stations. Commissioned by MTA Arts and Design, the mosaics Each One and Equal All depict different visual themes in Cave’s Soundsuits series. Along with a 2021 mosaic titled Every One, they span 4,600 sq ft, forming Cave’s largest permanent public artwork to date.

‘It’s all been in the works for about two and a half years,’ says Cave. ‘It’s not just bringing your work to the museum. The studio work had to be completed a month in advance so that I could be fully available for this immersive moment.’ He adds, ‘Unfortunately, we’re in this non-stop state of turmoil and trauma right now. I’m just excited that there is this place that we can go to reflect and mourn, to find some sort of calm.’

A collaboration with Knoll Textiles

Ahead of the opening of ‘Forothermore’ at the Guggenheim, the artist will unveil a comprehensive collaboration with Knoll Textiles – the company’s first partnership with an artist. Consisting of four upholsteries, three draperies and three wallcoverings, the vibrant textile collection conveys Cave’s sense of dimension, colour and movement, with each design referencing a specific artwork and dutifully capturing the visceral and tactile essence of the original piece.

‘When I was invited to do this collaboration, I immediately thought of Cranbrook [Academy of Art], where I did my graduate work,’ recalls Cave. ‘I was surrounded by Knoll and by [Eliel and Eero] Saarinen. I would pull out these amazing textiles created in the 1970s, and think about the Arts and Crafts movement and its influence. It’s part of my DNA now. I’m always thinking about the transition: how does an artwork transition into a textile or bronze? It comes down to the essence, and transferring that essence over.’

Created in deep dialogue with Cave and his creative and life partner, Bob Faust, the Knoll Textiles collection is an achievement in many ways. The collaboration kicked off in February 2021, when Cave selected 45 works for the Knoll Textiles team to riff on; they ultimately whittled these down to ten ambitious designs that take the artist collaboration trope to a whole new level. As expected, the draperies in the collection are the most delicate. ‘Until’, an airy, web-like textile made by embroidering on a water-soluble ground that dissolves to leave an open-weave structure, is based on an installation of the same name, while ‘Buttons’ nods to one of Cave’s Soundsuits, meticulously hand-beaded in buttons to achieve an ombré effect. The photorealist design was created by compositing multiple buttons together into a seamless, continuous pattern. In both cases, the results are subtle, yet dynamic and enticing.

‘Nick always uses conventional materials in unconventional ways,’ says Knoll Textiles designer Nina Chidichimo, who shepherded the collection into being with senior designer Mee Ok Ryu. ‘Working with him really pushed us in terms of how we typically create things. He really wanted it to feel organic and open, so we had a lot of conversations with mills that we normally wouldn’t, to make something extra special. There was a lot of trust too, as he gave us his body of work to run with. It was a great collaboration.’

The final drapery, ‘Heard’, is inspired by a fringed iteration of Cave’s Soundsuits. ‘We brought Nick a tiny sample of this and he automatically gravitated to it, because there’s such a direct correlation between this and his work,’ Chidichimo says of the drapery. ‘Each ribbon is individually sewn by hand in rows, so it also speaks to his handcrafted approach. The Soundsuits are not just objects, but meant to be moved in and worn.’

The collection’s upholsteries are just as adventurous. ‘Guise’ mixes knitted, space-dyed twisted yarns with chenille yarns, echoing the intricate top layer of Cave’s beaded Soundsuits with a dynamic, puckered effect. Drawing from a section of the installation Architectural Forest (2011), ‘Vert’ is a variegated design that distils the perfectly imperfect qualities so often seen in Cave’s work. Even more flexible is ‘Puff’, a cosy faux shearling available in 13 colours based on a rainbow fur Soundsuit. The final upholstery fabric, ‘Doily’, uses two upholstery techniques in varying scales on a woven ground to create a multidimensional effect. ‘The way in which these textiles and fabrics are built, nothing is flat,’ says Cave. ‘There is a dimension built within them that is visceral. I’ve always built cloth and so I wanted the same sensation to come across in these materials.’

The wallcoverings include ‘Wire’, a digitally printed fur pattern using matte ink on metallic mylar; ‘Forest’, a vertically charged warp lay that’s also inspired by Architectural Forest and probably the most joyful; and ‘Big Floral’, which recreates a pattern of antique beaded flowers from a Soundsuit on a larger scale. Available in their original bright hues as well as grayscale tones, the wallcoverings are tactile and exquisitely produced. 

Aside from their aesthetic value, the textiles convey a deep and powerful significance in their intention to represent original works that advance social justice. ‘It’s all part of being a collective,’ Cave summarises. ‘We’re here, we exist. We’re human. For me, [how I stay hopeful is by] striving for something, it’s about being purposeful. We all have to think about accountability and what it means in the larger picture. That is hope.’

INFORMATION

The Nick Cave collection launches on 27 October
‘Nick Cave: Forothermore’, is on view from 18 November 2022 to 10 April 2023 at Guggenheim, New York
guggenheim.org
knolltextiles.com
nickcaveart.com

Friends for more than three decades, Annabelle Harty and Sheelagh Boyce joined forces on a creative project inspired by their mutual love for art and architecture. In 2018, the pair launched Arrange Whatever Pieces Come Your Way, a growing collection of handcrafted quilts inspired by architecture and landscape, reproducing images from their personal collections, travel memories and ideas.

Referencing works by iconic architects and forgotten buildings, scenic vistas mixed with more conceptual images, the pair use materials from garments they gather from family and friends, imbuing each piece they create with a deeper, personal meaning. Four of their quilts are now on view at The Modern Institute, Glasgow (until September 2022), showing their diverse approaches to the medium and their inspirations. 

For Quilts 37 and 38, Boyce and Harty used an Issey Miyake plantation dress, the garment’s pattern subtly reflected in the quilts’ shapes.

True to form, each quilt is defined by architectural and historical references: the designs feature a nod to the neolithic standing stones of Avebury, whose shape is traced on blue fabric. On the back, Quilt 37 is defined by the silhouette of the Inverkip power station, a 1970s building that was decommissioned shortly after completion due to the 1973 oil crisis and never operated as intended.

The duo’s interest for demolished or never realised structures is reflected on the back of Quilt 38, characterised by a rendering of the imposing Pinkston cooling tower, a 1950s building originally conceived to generate electricity for Glasgow’s tramway and subway system. 

Infusing the collection with colour, Quilt 39 features a yellow and blue cotton textile from a Nathalie du Pasquier shirt, while the more subtle reverse features three pairs of gym shorts.

‘This is the first time Arrange Whatever Pieces Come Your Way has incorporated a  patterned fabric, focusing on the quality and consistency of the print in contrast to the pink backing, tonally displaying the wear and use of the material,’ reads a note accompanying the exhibition. ‘The geometry of the dissected shorts on the reverse focuses on the space around the squares and the central line that connects the three garments.’

For Quilt 40, Boyce and Harty chose to focus on negative space (something they experimented with in previous quilts). For this piece, they used workers’ jackets, whose pockets and functional details are still visible on the surface, in brown, green and orange, counterbalanced with white to enhance the negative space concept. This piece is exemplary of the duo’s work, merging personal connections, fashion and architecture: the white back, they explain, is constructed from the nightshirts of Harty’s father, architect Brian Henderson, which are ‘intricately pieced together, with a black dome at the bottom, an homage to the power station, Sizewell B, which Henderson designed’. 

INFORMATION

Arrange Whatever Pieces Come Your Way, The Modern Institute, Aird’s Lane, Bricks Space, until September 2022

arrangewhateverpiecescomeyourway.com

At 87 years old, Sheila Hicks is showing no signs of slowing down. The textile artist has been the subject of solo exhibitions in Dallas, Miami, Vienna, Milan, Paris and Riyadh since our paths last crossed – in 2018 at the preview of her show in Tel Aviv. Now at The Hepworth Wakefield, putting on the finishing touches to her first major UK survey ahead of the opening on 7 April, the exuberant and ever-disarming artist has wrested creative control of her own portrait shoot from a flustered but obliging photographer. 

This is the first time Hicks has been able to visit the David Chipperfield-designed museum in person, having worked on it remotely for the past couple of years (a scale model of the galleries, she explains, lived in her Paris studio throughout). ‘Off Grid’ traces Hicks’ prolific output, from the 1950s to new site-specific commissions, spanning intimate woven images to towering installations. ‘It was fascinating to watch her enter the space, mapping and reading it in ways that I hadn’t seen other artists do, looking at the light sources, thinking of the angles,’ explains the museum’s chief curator Andrew Bonacina. ‘Across the exhibition, you’ll see an artist who has really explored the endless possibilities of fibre and thread as a sculptural material.’

Hicks is famously adamant about looking forwards and even now, her sculptural works are adapted for the space. ‘So many of the historical works, those made in the 1960s and 70s, will never be installed the same way twice – they will always transform, they will always change,’ adds Bonacina. ‘And so much of our conversation has been how these works might respond to the spaces they are being presented in.’ The final space, for example, is dedicated to works made over the past decade including a multi-part installation created in response to the architecture of the Hepworth. Many of the ideas explored here nod to motifs established earlier in her career, such as wrapped linen cords (found in the previous Lianes works), or the stacking of textiles (a nod to her Banisteriopsis and Evolving Tapestry series). 

And it’s not just Hicks’ terrific textiles that prove a draw. The artist’s photography offers a view into a rarely-seen side of her creative practice – not least because the black-and-white images are in many ways the antithesis to her riotous textile works. Her interest in the medium formed early in her career during trips to South America between 1954 and 1961, which included extensive travels throughout Chile with Magnum photographer Sergio Lorrain. ‘The camera was a way in which to think about framing the world – they became another frame in the way the stretched canvas or the loom became within which she could capture her experiences,’ explains Bonacina. Hicks has said: ‘I was using the camera’s positionings for looking, not always to take photographs.’

The show continues in the Hepworth Wakefield Garden with a monumental new work – a five-metre-tall column of cascading ribbons. Gabriel Reaching for Heaven (2022) mirrors its immediate surroundings, including the landscaping by Tom Stuart-Smith, Chipperfield’s architecture, and the newly redeveloped Rutland Mills (itself a former textile factory) adjacent to the museum. In London, meanwhile, an outdoor installation at Coal Drops Yard commissioned by the King’s Cross Estate will open to the public from 26 May. Hicks’ work here will respond to the Victorian architecture, creating a gently moving garden in the sky and threading King’s Cross – the starting point for many to reach Wakefield – with the exhibition at the Hepworth.

INFORMATION

Sheila Hicks, ‘Off Grid’, until  25 September 2022, The Hepworth Wakefield. hepworthwakefield.org

The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco opens its doors again this month for the first time since the pandemic with a suitably powerful double-header featuring the works of two ascendant African artists – the Ghanaian painter Amoako Boafo and Malawi-born, Johannesburg-based artist Billie Zangewa. Both on view until early 2022, the duo of exhibitions mark the first solo museum shows of each artist, who are both widely considered amongst the most important African contemporary artists on the international stage.

Despite the simultaneous openings, each artist has been duly given their own spotlight. Boafo presents over 20 works that he created between 2018 and 2021. The exhibition, titled ‘Soul of Black Folks’ after the pioneering book of essays by sociologist and Pan Africanist WEB Du Bois, invites viewers to challenge their perceptions of the Black figure. This dialogue is intentionally amplified by the context of Du Bois’ historical writing, which contributed to the coining of the term ‘double consciousness’ to summarise the way Black people often had to view themselves through the eyes of others. Boafo’s deeply personal works, which represent sitters of all walks of African life, are steadfast celebrations of Blackness; each is an assertion of dignity and importance.

‘Du Bois’ text serves as rich source material that provides a conceptual framework for the exhibition,’ writes curator Larry Ossei-Mensah, adding that Du Bois is actually buried in Osu, Ghana, Boafo’s hometown. ‘Viewers are asked to reflect on what it means for people from the African diaspora to take agency in cultivating one’s narrative, aesthetic, and cultural expression. How does this radical act become a catalyst for a heightened sense of Black consciousness and liberation that is antithetical to the Western canonical discourse?’

Boafo’s captivating point of view is complemented by the intricate collages of textile artist Billie Zanegawa, who is exhibiting works from the past 15 years as well as new pieces made specially for ‘Thread for a Web Begun’. Zangewa’s intricate creations are enhanced by her deep understanding of textiles. From early works that feature embroideries on pieces of found fabric to more recent works that have been composed using hand-stitched fragments of raw silk, Zangewa portrays a range of personal and universal experiences using domestic interiors, urban landscapes and portraiture to challenge historical stereotypes, objectification and exploitation of the Black female form.

Zangewa’s depictions of the female experience are based on her own navigations of life in Johannesburg. Her representations of domestic scenes are inspired by the ‘daily feminism’ as she calls it, of the oft-overlooked, yet valuable work that women do daily to keep society running smoothly. 

‘Through the method of their making and their narrative content, Zangewa’s silk paintings illustrate gendered labour in a socio-political context, where the domestic sphere becomes a pretext for a deeper understanding of the construction of identity, questions around gender stereotypes, and racial prejudice,’ states curator Dexter Wimberly of Zangewa’s labour-intensive process. ‘She explores the different roles that women play in society, including motherhood and the impact that it has individually and collectively. The images in her work are deliberately decontextualised. However, when shown in a group, their fragmentary nature is further emphasised, suggesting they are excerpted from a larger narrative.’

Zangewa’s deep exploration of individual and collective identity, and of modern Black femininity will soon gain traction around the world, with solo shows upcoming at Lehmann Maupin gallery in its Seoul and London locations in November 2021.

INFORMATION

Amoako Boafo, ‘Soul of Black Folks’ and Billie Zangewa, ‘Thread for a Web Begun’, until 27 February 2021, Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD)

moadsf.org

The iconic American designer and architect Alexander Girard stands at the heart of a new capsule collection of reissued fabrics from the equally venerable textile house, Maharam. Released as part of its ‘Textiles of the 20th Century’ collection, the six reintroduced designs have been drawn from Girard’s tenure as founding design director of Herman Miller’s textile division, from the years 1952 to 1973, during which he created over 300 designs. Maharam’s eye-catching offering brings together some of the most enduring designs during that period, and will be available in two upholsteries, three wall coverings and one hand-woven rug. 

Alexander Girard and Maharam’s ‘Textiles of the 20th Century’ collection

Girard’s inspiring ability to hone in on graphic patterns and create unusual combinations is put fully on display in Maharam’s new selection. No stranger to highlighting Girard’s brilliance – the ‘Textiles of the 20th Century’ collection already includes 30 Girard patterns to date – Maharam’s commitment to loyally reproducing these historic designs is matched by an underlying innovative spirit that keeps the design in step with current times. The company has even commissioned a short film for this occasion, highlighting the impact of Santa Fe and the surrounding New Mexico landscape on Girard’s life and work. 

Specifically in the reproduction of ‘Mexidot’ (1963), an upholstery pattern that was originally released as part of a series of handwoven stripes called ‘Mexicotton’, Girard Studio (the entity run by the Girard family to promote and preserve Girard’s legacy) requested that the updated version be produced with reduced environmental impact and accessibility in mind. Maharam Design Studio has used recycled spun yarns to emulate the original look of natural cotton, while ensuring the textile still stands up to contemporary needs for high traffic seating.

Helmed by co-creative directors Alexander Kori Girard and Aleishall Girard Maxon, the designer’s grandchildren, Girard Studio states, ‘Sustainability and material quality have always been important considerations in the work we do with Maharam, but now more than ever we are striving to create products that enhance the built world around us while making minimal impact on the earth. This new collection is especially exciting in its use of postconsumer recycled and renewable materials.’ The three wallpaper designs: ‘Alphabet’ (1952), ‘Roman Stripe’ (1952), and ‘Broken Stripe’ (1952), have been digitally printed on non-PVC substrate, while retaining the warmth, tactility and vibrancy of the originals. 

The collection is a testament to the timelessness of Girard’s aesthetic. ‘Pepitas’ (1952), an upholstery design featuring a pointed ellipsis formed by two intersecting discs of the same radius, which overlap so that the centre of one shape lies on the perimeter of the other, is an example of the staple designs that could be used in multiple applications, from drapery to wallpaper. Even the ‘Millerstripe’ rug, which is based on an upholstery textile designed in 1972 (and reissued by Maharam in 2002), celebrates the power of the universal stripe and is made from a wool twill that depicts the design’s original polychromatic layout at double its original scale.

‘The great thing about Girard’s designs is that with it all being from one hand, much of it works well together. I like that these designs reflect Girard’s belief that textiles are a fundamental building material for any space,’ says Maharam’s vice-president of design, Mary Murphy. 

A Girard Studio statement concludes: ‘From an aesthetic perspective, we are thrilled to continue building awareness about the diversity in Girard’s vast stable of designs. Classic but unexpected at the same time, these upholsteries, wallcoverings, and rugs offer an understated but still distinctly Girard flavour.’ 

Watch: Alexander Girard and New Mexico

Filmography: Alejandro Durán / Luma Projects

INFORMATION

maharam.com

Dutch designers Brecht Duijf and Lenneke Langenhuijsen graduated from the Man and Wellbeing programme at Design Academy Eindhoven four years apart. They met in Milan in 2011, as they were unpacking their respective works at Salone del Mobile. ‘Our products had exactly the same colours,’ the pair recall. ‘From that moment on we started to meet once in a while and soon we started collaborating.’

Beyond colours, their shared interests formed a fertile ground for collaboration: while Duijf focused on researching the reflective potential of materials, from mirrors and beyond, Langenhuijsen looked at how wood can be made flexible, bending it and manipulating it to the point of becoming textile. The duo’s explorations have seen Buro Belén named as one of 25 creative leaders of the future by Formafantasma, for Wallpaper’s 25th Anniversary Issue ‘5x5’ project.

Buro Belén: key questions for design

Working together under the Buro Belén aegis (‘Just a name we both find beautiful,’ they say), their projects originate from an interest in and connection to the material and spatial world. They always start with an analysis of their context and a series of guiding questions: ‘What materials are available? What are their different appearances? What could they be used for? How can we make sure that [a product] ages or cycles in an interesting way?’

From this inquisitive starting point, they look at their surroundings’ past and potential future, they say, ‘respecting old layers and adding new smart layers, to bring a place into the present and enrich its soul’.   

Among their key projects so far they name Living Colours (2015), which explored natural colourants and featured a ‘De-Colourchart’ that shows how colour as matter is alive and changes over time, inspiring creatives to ‘design within time’, factoring ageing into a product’s design. 

Sun+ (2018) is based on broader material research, questioning humans’ relation to the sun through history and culture, looking both at overexposure and the use of sunscreen. It resulted in a series of textile products including a pair of ‘Unseen’ sunglasses, a ‘Vitamin’ hat and ‘Suntent’, ‘Shade Cloths’ and the ‘Prosol D’ parasol (some of which were acquired by MoMA), illustrating ‘the alternative ways – and alternative materials – we can use for a healthy and clean way of living under the sun’.

Another seminal project was their first solo exhibition, titled ‘Soft Borders’ and shown at Amsterdam’s Looiersgracht 60 in 2018. For the designers, seeing their different material research projects come together into a space was a valuable experience, one that set their path in the direction of interior design, with their first project currently in the works. Other future endeavours will focus on walls: ‘They are our third skin in a way,’ they say. ‘Walls are our connection, or maybe disconnection, to the outside world: how do they impact our behaviour? How can they become less definitive, less static? How can they grow with our changing relationship with “the outside world”?’

For Duijf and Langenhuijsen, this focus on immediate surroundings should be a key aspect in a designer’s outlook, especially for younger generations approaching design practice. ‘Study your surroundings, and you’ll see possible projects that need a creative mind,’ they say. ‘Don’t think as big as the world’s problems. It will kill your skill of seeing possibilities.’

INFORMATION

burobelen.com

A version of this article appears in Wallpaper’s October 2021, 25th Anniversary Issue (W*270), on newsstands now and available to subscribers – 12 digital issues for $12/£12/€12.
Meet more creative leaders of the future nominated by Formafantasma here.

Unlike its flamboyant older sibling in Manhattan, the brand new Ace Hotel Brooklyn exudes an understated, original charm: a home-from-home with all the trimmings, particularly when it comes to art. 

Behind its Roman and Williams and Stonehill Taylor-designed brutalist facade, and the cascading light fixture inspired by Tokyo’s Hotel Okura is a new in-room art programme that narrates the history of Brooklyn through fibre art. Inside the 287 guest rooms – inspired by the raw artist studio spaces of the European modernists – hangs the work of two dozen contemporary textile artists with deep ties to the district’s rich tapestry. 

But this festival of fibre art is far from confined to the guest rooms. In the hotel’s ground floor gallery space is a public exhibition by artist and designer Cynthia Alberto and Brooklyn based weaving studio and healing arts centre, Weaving Hand.

In September and October, the gallery will host a group show by the in-room art programme artists. In November, timed to NYC Design Week, the space will be taken over by Black Folks in Design, and the textile art series will reach its finale in December with an experimental show by the Textile Art Center. 

Ace commissioned longtime collaborator Niki Tsukamoto, an artist who also created original works for the guest rooms, to curate Ace’s fibre art project. We speak to Tsukamoto about weaving the threads of this project to life.

Wallpaper*: How was the project conceived and what inspired it?

Niki Tsukamoto: At the end of Summer 2019, Ace Hotel reached out, asking if I would be interested in curating fibre-based art for the in-room art program for a new hotel. I’ve been working in fibre for over 20 years and had been on hiatus from my curatorial work for a few years, so I was extremely interested in the project. When it was later revealed that the hotel was in Brooklyn I was ecstatic. I have so many dear friends living in Brooklyn, it's been my home away from home for the past 25 years and I love it dearly. That coupled with the opportunity to work with an incredible array of textile artists living and working there currently, the offer was almost too good to be true. 

Wallpaper*: How were the artists selected for the Textile and Fibre Art Programme; were there any particular criteria? 

NT: Representing the community was of the utmost importance to me when approaching the initial curatorial concept. Rather than looking for cohesion in form or style, my main focus was on including an array of current working artists and telling the recent history of the fibre art movement in Brooklyn – the artists reflect a modern reality of New York, ranging from those locally born and raised to the somewhat new arrivals, artists with deep roots in community service and activism, as well as people who transition in and out of the city and carry with them lasting love for Brooklyn.

The varied styles of work are a clear reflection of the way the city influences and inspires people in such different ways. Beyond artists connected to the immediate community, we included certain artists in the program to provide much-needed humour, wit and levity that the Ace is known for. 

Wallpaper*: What do you hope the programme will offer guests of the Ace Brooklyn? 

NT: Having such a diverse group of artists creating such vastly different work offers a very different experience depending on the guest's room. When someone checks into their hotel room, they may experience a work filled with humour and wit or a piece whose meaning is embedded within colour and texture. The varied styles of work are also a clear reflection of the way the city influences and inspires people in such different ways.

I wanted the feeling of the community to permeate the hotel and connect from room to room, like a thread running up and through the building. I hope the program will also inspire and produce a sense of curiosity in the people staying in the hotel, which will lead them to learn more about the individual artists and fibre art as a whole.

Wallpaper*: What was the most enjoyable part of working with the artists and Ace Brooklyn on the project?

NT: The most enjoyable aspect of working on this project has without a doubt been being in a community with so many incredibly talented and inspiring people and building lasting relationships. It’s also been a dream to bring more attention to the artists' individual art practices and to focus solely on fibre art for the whole scope of the project. After personally working in fibre for over 20 years, it is very moving to see fibre and textile artists receiving well-deserved attention.

Co-curating the current show in Ace’s lobby Gallery — Cynthia Alberto and Weaving Hand — and the upcoming September group gallery exhibition of the artists who contributed to the hotel has been so satisfying. It will allow the viewers to reconceptualise art inside the guest rooms and hopefully create a deeper understanding of the artist's work.

INFORMATION 

acehotel.com

Borre Akkersdijk, co-founder of Dutch textile innovation studio and clothing label Byborre, was drawn to the textile industry because it was one of the few sectors that had yet to be truly modernised. Textiles, of course, were a key driver of the Industrial Revolution. And, much later, the boom of fast fashion in the 1990s accelerated the growth of the industry. But, Akkersdijk says, ‘this was all in an old-school way. It was not driven by technology but by big, labour-intensive factories. Byborre was inspired by the tactility of textiles in a world that had not been revolutionised.’

Founded in 2010, Byborre is committed to curbing wasteful practice in the industry. Within the textile supply chain, fibre makers often influence the direction of yarn makers, who influence the direction of textile manufacturers. At the receiving end are the creators, who generally have little say in what and how textiles are made. When they need textiles for their products, they mostly choose from what is on the market, or visit industry fairs in search of something that comes closest to what they have in mind. So paradoxically, while brand designers best understand their end users, it is textile manufacturers who are driving the product. It is this misalignment which, over the last decade, Byborre has addressed in its mission to build a new ecosystem. ‘We flipped the supply chain the other way around,’ says Akkersdijk. ‘We start from the creators.’ 

Byborre: ‘We developed a new process that allows creators to innovate’

The company recently launched Byborre Create, a scalable platform, operated through an online app, that provides creators with direct access to sustainable design choices, innovations and creative tools. The goal is to democratise innovation, support responsible textile production, and encourage fitter-for-purpose, longer-lasting products. ‘We developed a new process that allows creators to innovate,’ Akkersdijk says.

Byborre Create breaks down the supply chain into four simple design steps, and guides brands through an intuitive workflow: firstly, determining the function of the fabric – be it for clothing, interiors or automotive – and choosing suitable yarns from the platform’s curated and vetted library; secondly, exploring knit types to find the perfect weight and structure to match their creative vision; thirdly, composing the colour; and finally, adding aesthetic elements to infuse their brand’s DNA into the textile.

Better products, less textile waste

‘When creators and brands start using the platform, we start a new dialogue. So we all learn and improve when everybody uses it. We want to change the industry with this honest open-source mentality. We want brands to make better products and fewer mistakes, so that there is less harm to the environment.’ 

Akkersdijk points out that the textile industry’s R&D process can be staggeringly wasteful. ‘As a creator, if you don’t have influence in that process, how can you control your impact?’ he says. So Byborre set up a hub in Amsterdam for R&D and sampling. When creative needs have been defined, a thorough production brief is sent to the respective factories. ‘The machines here mirror exactly those in the factories that we have licences with. Now, because Byborre brings in clients, ensures material supply and provides them with the best programme and design, the factories can lower their minimum order quantity (it was usually between 2,000m and 5,000m, but they can now work with as little as 250m) and it allows quicker delivery. The brands don’t have to worry about overproducing or sharing the same textile design with competitors.’

Transparency of each product’s impact

Akkersdijk believes there also needs to be a transparent overview of the product. ‘At the moment, we are making our own life cycle assessment [an analysis of the potential environmental impact of products during their entire life cycle] for all textiles created by or through us, and a product passport that shows where the fibre came from, where the yarn was born, where the textile was created, and how it was shipped; in short, the textile’s full journey.’ 

Happily, Byborre isn’t short of like-minded stakeholders in the industry. Collaborators, many of whom already use Byborre Create, include AZ Factory, BMW, Kering, Porter, and Natuzzi, with which it most recently launched the ‘Water’ textile collection. Byborre is also working with Sabine Marcelis and Formafantasma for upcoming textile developments. In the future, it hopes to set up hubs in Asia and the US to achieve another important marker of sustainable development – proximity to its markets.

INFORMATION

This article appears in the August 2021 issue of Wallpaper* (W*268), now on newsstands and available for free download

byborre.com

It’s difficult to gauge the impact cashmere has on the environment and how it affects its provenance land, Mongolia. Long touted as the luxurious wool for lavish loungewear, cashmere has lost part of its glory due to cheap sweaters popping everywhere on the high street and pushing the industry to produce more while cutting its prices. The downfall: cashmere production has an environmental impact that is 100 times higher than wool. Add this to the fact that four goats are required to produce a single cashmere sweater – whereas one sheep carries enough fibre to make five wool sweaters. The maths is easy.

The increase in cashmere demand has pushed herdsmen to raise far too many goats on Mongolian’s pastures, which damages the land and leaves it at threat of desertification. On the other hand, fashion companies started purchasing the material from Inner Mongolia – a Chinese region churning out low quality cashmere – without being transparent on its source. No wonder brands such as Stella McCartney and Patagonia, in their commitment to stop harming the planet, have decided to use only recycled cashmere from factories in Italy. But what if there was another solution to continue working with local herdsmen at a fair price for themselves, the animals and the grasslands?

Meet Mandkhai Jargalsaikhan, the Mongolian designer who grew up in her parents’ cashmere factory and learned first hand everything there is to know about wool. ‘It really was my playground!’ she laughs. Set up in post-Communist Mongolia, the thriving business also acted as a not-to-be-missed tourist stop for Western celebrities, such as Richard Gere or Hillary Clinton, visiting the country. The now 31-year-old woman remembers asking their autograph for other people as a little girl not knowing who they were.

After studying fashion design in London aged 20, Jargalsaikhan started her eponymous brand in 2016 based on fashion-forward cashmere pieces combining the quality of Mongolian crafts with a bold and modern design. ‘I remember spending a lot of time watching the workers and learning simple knitting techniques from them,’ says the designer. ‘So I know what goes into making a beautiful cashmere piece and how to really appreciate the craftsmen for their skills.’

Being at the heart of the cashmere industry means that the label has complete control over its entire supply chain. From the raw material provided by free-roaming goats to the dyeing process and creation of the pieces in its very own factory, Mandkhai ensures that the extra fine cashmere collections it creates respect the land where it takes its source as well as the people who make them. Around 70 per cent of the 200 factory workers are female with high knitting skills who are able to hand stitch the beautiful details on the brand’s jackets and trousers. ‘It is extremely important for us to pass on the knowledge to the next generation as well as to support women from local communities,’ adds the designer.

Besides her efforts in keeping a small carbon footprint and delivering high quality, sustainable cashmere, Jargalsaikhan is equally attached to change the current mindset. She aims to design clothing far from being basic or boring and that speaks to fashion savvy customers, which now also include men. As a reward, her perfectly cut, colourful coats have attracted the likes of Gigi and Bella Hadid who have helped boost sales and reach an international market. Ultimately this will also spread a more ethical vision of the luxurious material into the mass market while still being able to enjoy the soft fabric made by a goat-to-garment ethos. 

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Mandkhai website

Bernhardt Design unveils the Duality collection, a series of upholstery textiles designed by British-Ghanaian designer Chrissa Amuah and featuring a palette of 56 colours over six different patterns.

The collection, Amuah explains, was inspired by Ghanaian heritage, including symbolism, textures, colours and traditional patterns. ‘On trips to Ghana, I would see these symbols etched in the surfaces of everyday life, from jewellery to architecture,’ says the designer.

‘Therefore, my design vision developed naturally. I saw that Ghanaian symbology offered the chance to establish a design blueprint that is contemporary and beautiful, but also has an underlying meaning – one that consciously or subconsciously sends empowering messages.’

Among the collection’s six designs is the patterned ‘Aya’ fabric, inspired by the West African Adinkra symbol for fern: ‘The fern is a symbol of endurance and resourcefulness, which is a very hopeful message,’ says Amuah. ‘I used a super-fine chenille yarn to float above the abstracted fern symbols to create an overlay effect.’ She imagined the ‘Aya’ pattern in combination with another from the collection, ‘Still’, a monochromatic textured fabric available in a rich palette of 18 colours.

‘Ink’, meanwhile, is a design Amuah created by drizzling ink on pieces of walnut veneer and letting it bleed into the wood grain. ‘It was wonderful because I had limited control of the outcome. The ink spread to form unique lines, creating an abstract pattern,’ she says. These patterns were then replicated on thick, textured chenille and printed in four hues. As with the pairing of ‘Aya’ and ‘Still’, ‘Ink’ is imagined in combination with another design, a textured bouclé called ‘Snug’.

More Ghanaian inspiration can be found in the ‘Sella’ textile, whose name references the Latin for ‘stool’ and whose design nods to the country’s traditional asesegua seat. Explains Amuah: ‘The asesegua has a long history and takes many forms, from a commonly used wooden stool to elaborate versions created for royalty.’ The design for this fabric was sketched by Amuah by hand, abstractly replicating the familiar forms of the asesegua. 

The final material in the collection is called ‘Touch’, a finely textured fabric created using two complementary yarns in contrasting shades, creating a fine pattern that has vibrancy and depth.

Alongside her heritage, Amuah also explored colour and its symbolic meanings when putting together the collection’s palette. ‘Colours offer their own visual indicators and work with patterns to form a complete picture,’ she notes. ‘The meanings of different colours can change based on context, which may include: intended message, occasion, status, or even age.’

‘Chrissa is an amazing artist because she captures ideas that have very personal meaning, and she transforms them into an accessible design form,’ says Jerry Helling, president of Bernhardt Design. ‘She was able to abstract these inspirations to create sophisticated and modern fabrics beautifully.’

INFORMATION

bernhardtdesign.com
amwadesigns.com