TRICIA GUILD
The British designer celebrates 50 print-, pattern- and colourfilled years in the business.
The British designer celebrates 50 print-, pattern- and colour-filled years in the business
From the moment Tricia Guild OBE founded Designers Guild in 1970, her life and work have been all about art and colour. “My first Indian block-printinspired collection, Village, was maybe the reverse of everything I was seeing around me in the early ’70s,” she says, perched elegantly on an upholstered turquoise ottoman — one of Guild’s signature shades — in her King’s Road store in Chelsea, London.
“Habitat [Sir Terence Conran’s revolutionary contemporary lifestyle store] had just opened, but otherwise, there wasn’t much else to buy. It was all very chintzy, and I’m not so chintzy,” she laughs. “I had my little lime-green Mini, which I’d covered on the inside with two of my earliest fabric designs, Peaweed and Gibweed, also in lime. People thought I was barking mad.”
To fabrics, wallpaper, bed linen, towels, paint and ceramics, Guild brought rich, wild, vibrant and sometimes even a little bit shocking swathes of colour. Vivid jewel hues were often acid neon; other times, patterned, striped or with an ombré effect. But never were they dull. She looked to the art world for inspiration, too, collaborating on early textile collections with tapestry ››
“Creativity and artistry feed our souls. They elevate life into an art form – the art of living”
TRICIA GUILD
‹‹ guru Kaffe Fassett, American painter Lillian Delevoryas and ceramicist Janice Tchalenko. In 1986, she translated the broad brushstrokes of British artist Howard Hodgkin into fabrics used for upholstery, cushions and accessories.
This season, Guild has drawn on ideas from both the Bloomsbury and Aesthetic art movements for the Le Poème de Fleurs collection. There are ongoing collaborations, too, with American decoupage artist John Derian and Christian Lacroix’s creative director Sacha Walckhoff.
Even the walls of the David Hockney exhibition at Tate Britain in 2017 were painted with Designers Guild shades, including Jaipur Dusk, Iron Ore and Red Velvet, each hand-picked by the artist to best resonate with his artworks.
“There is always a sense of the artist’s hand in everything we do,” Guild says of how each fabric or wallpaper collection starts as handpainted drawings before being transformed digitally into oversized flower prints, lush foliage, painterly geometrics or sharp Kandinsky-esque abstracts.
In her most recent book, Tricia Guild: In My View, Guild details the creative process behind building both her London and Umbrian homes. “It shows another side of my work, which is more contemporary than people think,” she says. “I wanted the Italian house to be particularly about turning something ordinary, like a long farmhouse, into an artistic endeavour — staying true to the local vernacular but giving it a modern edge.
“Creativity and artistry feed our souls. They elevate life into an art form — the art of living. It is a missed opportunity to live any other way.” This ethos is certainly at the heart of Out of the Blue, an exhibition celebrating 50 years of Designers Guild, opening soon at London’s Fashion and Textile Museum.
So, how does 50 years of keeping the interiors world on its toes feel? “It’s just a number,” Guild says. “Of course, it’s very nostalgic looking back, and there are lovely memories, but the exhibition is also about what’s going on now. It’s not about the past because I’m only ever thinking about the future.”
designersguild.com; enquiries to Radford radfordfurnishings.com.au
Out of the Blue: 50 Years of Designers Guild is on at the Fashion and Textile Museum from 14 February to 14 June 2020; ftmlondon.org