Divine design ... an open and shut case

A display of Orla Kiely’s work is both retrospective and celebration

STEM – you probably know the print, or you would if you saw it. A simplified leaf motif on an ever-repeated stem. Such is the popularity of this most well known of designer Orla Kiely’s prints that it has been licensed to appear on everything from mugs to tents, from a Tesco jute shopping bag to her own high-end fashion line.

John Lewis homeware is full of it, from curtains to teapots. Indeed you could probably walk into the deepest crater on the furthest planet and find an alien with a laser gun decked out in the latest version of Stem.

But then Kiely’s design vision, showcased in this new show from Dovecot, is so strong that many of her other designs are instantly recognisable too. Much of it is in the repeat, a dense, intense repetition that is inspired by the 1960s and 1970s. The strength is in the motif, the colour and the symmetric predictability.

A Life in Pattern, remodelled here for Dovecot’s space, was first shown in London last year at the Fashion and Textile Museum, before the news that Kiely’s fashion brand had gone into liquidation last autumn.

Even ubiquity and celebrity following – Alexa Chung, Keira Knightley and the Duchess of Cambridge among many others were fans of the brand’s clothing – could not save it from the savage vagaries of the high street and the uncertainties of the current economic climate. Perhaps ubiquity, too, was part of the problem.

What this show is, then, is a retrospective as well as a celebration. But it is not a full stop, for Kiely’s designs are still licensed to various companies, a number based in Scotland, producing her bright patterns on homewares, examples of which, taken from the past 30 years, are shown in Perspex boxes in a corridor “print library”.

In an annex, personal photos show Kiely’s early history, from childhood to student, then family life, and there are fascinating gleanings from the workshop, scraps of fabric, pattern swatches, queries and instructions to makers on how best to line a concertina bag to avoid sagging – it is the attention to detail that is key in Kiely’s work.

If what we see here is, in clothes form, no longer available, it is already as much a part of design history as the mid-century aesthetic that inspired it.

Kiely is here, as I walk round the gallery on the last day of installation, a flurry of people up ladders, pushing trolleys, positioning labels. We stand in front of a wall of bags – there must be a hundred – of all shapes and sizes. Nearly all are instantly recognisable as her work, although some could trick you into thinking they were vintage 1970s pieces.

“That’s the earliest,” she says, pointing up at a red felt bag on the top row.

Many of the bags have come out of

her own archive. “Most of them I hadn’t seen for years!” she says. “And that one I found on eBay.” She points to a carpet bag. “It’s lasted very well,” she says, considering.

Kiely tells me that pattern and colour were always in her sights, ever since, as a child, she lay on her bed, eyes closed, tracing the repeats in the densely patterned wallpaper in her room.

In 1982 she graduated in print and textile design from Dublin’s National College of Art and Design before getting her first job at clothing company Esprit, which taught her all about the process of commercial design.

Seven years later, in search of design autonomy, she completed an MFA at the Royal College of Art in London (1993) and subsequently set up her own business which traded initially in bags, then moved into clothing.

There are examples of that clothing all around the gallery, and not least in the final room, which is dominated by the giant-sized dresses hung from the rafters, a sort of Alice in Wonderland effect designed, I am told, to make you feel like a child as you wander around.

In a cabinet are some miniature dolls designed by Kiely for the exhibition in tandem with the artist Sarah Strachan, wearing the exact same dresses in miniature.

In the space, the close-up juxtaposition of her many patterns adds something new to the mix, and yet Kiely’s strong design vision means that any pattern, from those of her first collection to those of her last, could sit next to the other as if of the same vintage.

Orla Kiely: A Life in Pattern, Dovecot, 10 Infirmary Street, Edinburgh, www.dovecotstudios.org.uk check, until Jun 29, Mon-Sat, 10.30am-5.30pm

Above: Orla Kiely at her A Life in Pattern exhibition at the Dovecot gallery in Edinburgh Left: Some of her instantly recognisable designs