Category Archives: TEXTILE DESIGN

Puerto Rican textile designer Paola Melendez makes work with comfort in mind; her brand, titled Paola Melendez Casa, specialises in the most sumptuous fabrics made with craftsmanship and quality at their core. Working with hand-designed motifs, hand-crafted Belgian linen and screen-printed designs, her works are built to last, and she hopes, will become family heirlooms…

There is a striking, instantly appealing quality to London based designer Kangan Arora’s hand-printed textiles, which explore the eye-popping attraction of electrifyingly vivid colours. Her joyful and exuberant pattern designs blend the many cultural influences that have shaped her life, from her childhood in India to her life as a city dweller in London today,…

Leading Amsterdam design studio Buro Bélen have been steadily building their reputation as innovators in interior and textile design since 2012, and their work can now be found in major museum collections around the world. Their approach is simple yet admirable: to create useful products based on ethical production with a richly tactile, sensorial, and…

Innovation was at the heart of Ruth Adler Schnee’s design practice, which encompassed radical, modernist building interiors and woven textiles throughout the mid-century modernist era. After fleeing to the United States in 1938 to escape the Nazi regime, she went on to forge a monumentally successful career at a time when opportunities for women and…

From psychedelic swirls to towering fragments of brutalist architecture, the pioneering textiles of British designer Barbara Brown encapsulated the spirit of the 1960s space age. Looking to the future of design, she took inspiration from – as she put it – “machines and architecture”, to create visually striking patterns featuring vivid colours and dizzying optical…

Textile designer and artist Althea McNish holds a significant place in history, as the first designer of African-Caribbean descent to find international success. Her lively, exuberant textiles were a breath of fresh air in postwar 1950s Britain, injecting the cultural landscape with great swathes of lush, tropical colour. Turner found the inspiration for her fertile…

20th century British artist Henry Moore’s monumental sculpture is widely known and celebrated across the world, but perhaps less well studied is his intriguing relationship with textiles. During the 1940s and 1950s, Moore produced a body of textile designs, which open up a new understanding of his visual language, and his way of seeing and…

Frank Lloyd Wright might be best known as one of most revered American architects of entire 20th century – he pioneered the Prairie Style, along with ‘organic architecture’ designed in harmony with nature, and cutting-edge icons including New York City’s Guggenheim Museum. But perhaps less well known is his brief foray into textile and wallpaper…

Artist, designer and thinker, Josef Frank was an outspoken pioneer, whose practice spanned diverse disciplines, including art, architecture and textiles. In his textile and embroidery work he broke away from the simplicity of modernism with fluid, organic repeat patterns designed entirely by hand, featuring swirling flora and fauna in bold, Matisse-like motifs and intensely vivid…

Contemporary textile designer Lisa King makes striking prints which are an eclectic blend of influences, from the lush plant life of her childhood in Thailand to her mother’s vibrant collection of textiles and antiquities, her background training as a dancer, and her current life in industrialised London. She says, “I draw a lot of parallels…