“I paint flesh because I’m human. Flesh is just the most beautiful thing to paint.” Jenny Saville’s voluptuous, rippling folds of flesh explore the living, breathing human experience. On one hand she is a painter’s painter, who relishes in the messy, smeary liquidity of oil paint, but she also draws parallels between the sensuality of painting and…
Category Archives: PIONEERS
French husband-and-wife team Ramdane Touhami and Victoire de Taillac are one of the busiest and most entrepreneurial couples of today. Both are cofounders of Officine Universelle Buly, a luxury beauty brand with an emphasis on whimsical, naturally derived hand-made products and vintage-inspired graphics. Nomadic in nature, the pair prefer a life of travel and adventure…
Gabriel Hendifar and Jeremy Anderson are the ingenious power couple behind famed lighting brand Apparatus, which has been steadily growing in stature over the last ten years. With a 40 strong team and a busy Manhattan workshop, Apparatus have developed a cult following for their eccentric take on lighting, which incorporates subversive materials including suede,…
Anishka Clarke and Niya Bascom are the duo behind Ishka Designs, the Brooklyn-based interiors firm making waves around the world. With an impressive portfolio spanning New York, France, Jamaica and beyond, they have earned a reputation as pared back minimalists who take inspiration from the shapes, patterns and textures of nature, and a “waste-not”, ecological…
There is a quiet, understated elegance to the award-winning architecture of Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, which seems to blend effortlessly in with its surrounding space. In contrast with the macho, monolithic architecture that populates so many of our cities their world is more cerebral and considered, a contemplation of how real people and real…
Even though embroidery has been traditionally thought of as a female craft, today we will talk about Stewart Francis Easton, a sewing gent who enjoys making unexpected work and adding an alternative viewpoint and dynamism to embroidery. His hybrid technique of mixing digital print with hand embroidery means his work blurs the lines between craft,…
Husband-and-wife team Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch are the charismatic, larger-than-life founders of Roman and Williams, an American interiors and architecture firm making waves throughout the contemporary design world. Founded in 2002, their company took the names ‘Roman and Williams’ from their maternal grandfathers, a move that would set the stage for their design ethos,…
This tutorial will focus on the stitching of Sashiko on the fabric pieces cut out for the front and back bodices of the Ashton Top by Helen’s Closet. These fabric pieces have been prepared for Sashiko stitching by drawing 0.5cm x 0.5cm grids on them. For my preferred method for drawing a grid on dark-coloured…
This is a tutorial where I will be sharing how I embellish the Ashton Top (designed by Helen’s Closet Patterns) with Hitomezashi Sashiko. The tutorial is divided into two parts, and in the first instalment, we will be focusing on preparing the grid for Sashiko-stitching on the Ashton Top. After drawing the grid on the…
Polish artist and designer Sarah Lipska is an enigmatic figure, one whose life is only rarely written about in books and magazines. But hidden within the Met Museum in New York is a vast collection of samples from her embroidered textiles, each one adding an extra layer to the tapestry of her life. This collection…
“Form without colour is like a body without a soul”. Owen Jones was one of the most prolific and influential designers of the Victorian era, reinventing the ornate patterns and dazzling colours of the ancient world for a new era. A prolific polymath, his ideas spanned a huge range of fields including architecture, wallpaper, furniture,…
Leader in the Russian Constructivist movement of the early 20th century, Varvara Stepanova was a true radical, whose long and prolific career spanned many disciplines including painting, photography and design. Yet it was through textile production that she was able to live out her true life’s mission, to bring art out of the gallery space…
Zika and Lida Ascher were shape-shifting rulebreakers, who pushed the bounds of British fabric design in daring and unconventional new directions. Arriving in the UK at the outbreak of the Second World War, the young couple successfully redefined the bleak face of post-war British textiles throughout the 1940s with electrifying bursts of colour and life,…
Russian designer Anna Andreeva made a remarkable contribution to textile history, looking to the future with designs based on radio waves, electricity, algorithms and op art. Much like her predecessors Lyubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova, Andreeva combined the playful, abstract geometry of Russian Constructivism with industrial manufacture, spreading her ideas far and wide for the…
Lucienne Day was one of Britain’s foremost post-war designers, creating dazzling textiles that decorated almost every home across the country throughout the 1950s and beyond. Drawing on the English tradition for plant-based forms including flowers, grasses and seed heads, she went on to transform them into radical, abstracted repeat patterns, symbolising the regrowth of a…
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