Materialising Colour: Journeys with Giulio Ridolfo

Giulio Ridolfo works as a colour adviser to some of the world’s top interior and fashion companies, gathering inspirations from a plethora of sources and combining them into cohesive ranges. One of these companies is Danish textile producer Kvadrat, which was a collaborator on this work.

True to Ridolfo’s process, Materialising Colour traces a path from his inspirations, with photographer Howard Sooley alongside capturing the full colours of moments and places, before giving way to the creation of fabric ranges in Kvadrat’s mills and workshops. The core is the chapter on journeys, beginning with Ridolfo’s native Friuli and continuing through the Danish midsummer, indigo dyeing in Gujarat and a textile mill in Yorkshire, with a chapter on his Pale Shelter collaboration with Patricia Urquiola and Moroso included.

Chapters are punctuated by poems and explorations of subjects such as Ridolfo’s relationship with Friuli or the history of indigo, and the final chapter is an essay by design critic Anniina Koivu on the history of colour systems over the past 250 years. An absorbing dictionary of colour, including its place in pop culture, closes out the book, which is beautifully presented with a tactile fabric cover and textile frontispiece.