upholstery

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Image features a white polyester suede with stripes of organic "inkblots" in greens and pinks. Design scanned from a hand-stitched and shibori-dyed silk. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Shibori Stripe
One of the greatest challenges in designing commercial textiles has been creating durable, cleanable, affordable, and aesthetically pleasing fabrics for highly trafficked and 24/7 environments like healthcare facilities, theaters and airports. In addition, there is more demand for textiles with sustainable manufacturing practices, and companies like Designtex are taking on this responsibility and producing some...
Image features: Length of heavy off-white cotton printed with a dense pattern of wedges and dots in light blue with dark shading. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this image.
Chips
In the aftermath of World War II, a number of textile producers attempted to revitalize the industry by enlisting recognized personalities in art and architecture to design screen prints. “Perhaps the most outstanding name collection is Stimulus Fabrics produced by Schiffer Prints,” Alvin Lustig wrote in American Fabrics Magazine in 1951. “There was not a...
Image features a length of wool canvas with an irregular grid of embroidered floral and geometric borders. In gray, ochre, orange and white on a dark brown ground. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Borders
In 2005, Hella Jongerius was invited to curate a Selects exhibition at Cooper Hewitt. She became fascinated by the museum’s collection of over 1,000 embroidered samplers. For the exhibition, she made her own “Sampler Blankets,” which combined motifs drawn from the historic examples with industrial techniques like machine embroidery and needle-punch felting. These explorations were...
Image features a woven textile with a charcoal gray ground and a pattern of fragmented color wheels, made up of small squares of greens, gray-blues, browns, pinks, and off-whites. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Colorwheel
Since 2006, Hella Jongerius has been working with Swiss furniture producer Vitra, conducting an intensive study of the colors and textures of the materials used in the company’s products, from textiles and leathers to plastics and woods. Her research was intended to help the company’s designers and clients make the best possible use of color...
Image features: Neon yellow linear cube pattern on a grey ground. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Bright Cube
Along with Bright Grid and Bright Angle, Bright Cube is the second series of products designed by Dutch designers, Stefan Scholten (b. 1972) and Carole Baijings (b. 1973) of Scholten & Baijings in collaboration with Maharam. Their first, Blocks and Grid, is in Cooper Hewitt’s collection. Scholten & Baijings’s work is characterized by minimal forms...
Image features a length of woven textile with a deep blue ground and pattern of curved intersecting lines in medium blue. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Albemarle
Among Sir Paul Smith’s upholstery fabrics for Maharam, the dominant motifs are bolder and quirkier versions of classic menswear patterns such as stripes, plaid, herringbone, and houndstooth check. In a significant departure, the designer has based his latest on an iconic architectural feature. Named for the central London street address of the flagship Paul Smith...
Textile, "Gold Ripple-Wave Fabric", ca. 1956
A Fabric with a Touch of Tomorrow
To celebrate the opening of Saturated: The Allure and Science of Color, Object of the Day this month will feature colorful objects from the exhibition. This post was originally published September 4, 2012. America, 1957. Eisenhower was the President. Elvis was “the King.” And Ford Motor Company introduced its new 1957 automobiles, a “new kind...
Subtle monochrome pattern in grays gives impression of color unevenly applied due to folding of the substrate. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
A Fashionable Collaboration
In celebration of Women’s History Month, March Object of the Day posts highlight women designers in the collection. Knoll Luxe was launched in 2008 as a luxury fabric division of Knoll Textiles. The brand utilizes a global network of specialized and highly skilled textile mills to realize fabrics that combine classic modernism with a strong...
Upholstery fabric with irregular vertical stripes in saturated colors of blue-gray, black, gray, dark yellow, white, and bright pink. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Tactile Color
In celebration of Women’s History Month, March Object of the Day posts highlight women designers in the collection. In 2012, Knoll Textiles’ Creative Director Dorothy Cosonas approached Dutch graphic and book designer Irma Boom to develop a collection of textiles based on two of her books: Colour (Kleur) Based on Art, 2005 and Colour Based...