PROFILE: CLAUDIO ALCORSO

SHERIDAN AUSTRALIA CELEBRATES ITS 50TH ANNIVERSARY THIS YEAR WITH THE DEBUT OF ITS NEW HOMEWARES AND FURNITURE DESIGNS. CHRIS PEARSON SALUTES THE MAN WHO STARTED IT ALL.

As Sheridan Australia celebrates its 50th anniversary, we salute the man who started it all

IN FEBRUARY 1939, Italian émigré Claudio Alcorso walked down the gangway of the liner Strathallan at Fremantle. Dapperly dressed in a white linen suit, he was warned that people might mistake him for a milkman. In a country where most men wore drab grey woollen suits, he was destined to stand out. Alcorso had worked in the family textile business in Italy before attending the London School of Economics, where two Australian classmates told him our country bought more printed textiles per capita than anywhere else in the world. Barely off the boat, he set up Silk and Textile Printers in Sydney’s Rushcutters Bay to manufacture fashion fabrics. Soon he was employing 50 people, but with the advent of WWII, Alcorso — although a Jewish refugee from Mussolini’s regime — was interned as an enemy alien and sent to an internment camp in Hay, NSW, for three years. In October 1943, he was finally released and back in business. Ever eager to democratise art and driven by “a desire to introduce creative thought and beauty into the everyday things of life”, he invited artists Margaret Preston, William Dobell and Russell Drysdale to design his Modernage range of fabrics, which he displayed in the windows of David Jones. Then, on the back of government incentives to decentralise industry, he set up a second plant in Hobart. from top: Claudio Alcorso’s Hobart textile factory, 1954; Alcorso in front of wine tanks; Ken Done’s ‘Antarctica’ is one of the designs from the artist’s collaboration with Sheridan in the 1980s being revived for a limited edition S/S17 collection. In the 1960s, Alcorso conceived the idea of extending his passion for prints to bed linen, towels and curtains. When attending a Harvard Business School administration course, he met the CEO of US towel manufacturer Fieldcrest, who inspired Alcorso to diversify into domestic textiles to use loom downtime — a move backed by research suggesting consumers wanted colour and pattern in the home. So in 1967 he established Sheridan. As for the Sheridan name, two members of Alcorso’s marketing department sat down with a red wine at a Melbourne bar in 1967, brainstorming a brand name that was easy to spell and remember, and quintessentially British. One story goes they spied a liqueur named Sheridan (after bartender Joe Sheridan, the inventor of the Irish coffee) behind the bar. This prince of prints did things differently. His daughter, Caroline Alcorso, says her father fostered a progressive, relaxed workplace, even housing his Tasmanian workers, many Italian, in a Continentalstyle village. She fondly recalls finger-painting with her classmates and her father printing the designs onto swatches, bringing them to life. Every year she chose the latest bed linen for her bedroom. “The Sheridan sheets were amazing,” she says, “with really bright, warm spots, checks and paisleys. And lots of orange.” Alcorso’s generosity, stylishness and entrepreneurial spirit embraced many fields. In 1958, he helped pioneer the Tasmanian wine industry by establishing Moorilla vineyard on a peninsula overlooking the Derwent River. There he also commissioned two avant-garde houses from architect Roy Grounds, the Courtyard house, his own home inspired by a Roman villa, and the Round House for his parents, with rooms radiating from a chimney encased by a spiral staircase. Both buildings now bookend the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), with its entry through the former and exit through the latter. He also championed the arts as the founding chair of Opera Australia and as a director of both the Australian Ballet and the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust. Always with a strong social conscience, he campaigned to save the Franklin River in 1983. He died in 2000. “Claudio was a true visionary, the original renaissance man, urbane and totally engaged in the world,” says Dr Prudence Black, a design historian at the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and an expert on Alcorso, having studied his life. “He was always ahead of the game, imagining a world where design, music, wine and architecture really made a difference to the quality of life in Australia.” While Alcorso sold Sheridan to Dunlop in 1970, his legacy lives 50 years on. “Sheridan remains true to Claudio’s desire to bring Australian art into the everyday,” says group general manager Paul Gould. “Our in-house artists paint by hand, each creating a unique artwork that we translate into quality home textiles. Claudio’s devotion to craftsmanship, artistry and quality remain core pillars at Sheridan.”