Designers Guild at fifty
The colourful, innovative British brand celebrates its success
It is no mean feat for a designer to stay at the top of their game for over half a century, but it’s something Tricia Guild OBE, founder and creative director of Designers Guild, has successfully achieved with trailblazing technicolour glory. A fact that’s now being celebrated with ‘Out of the Blue: Fifty Years of Designers Guild’, a retrospective exhibition (and book, published by ACC Art Books) that has just opened at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London.
‘Out of the Blue’ chronicles the way Guild’s personal passions and lifestyle vision over the past five decades have consistently challenged and inspired how we decorate and furnish our homes. It covers her beginnings in the late 1960s as an interior designer, working alongside her first husband Robin Guild, to the opening of Designers Guild, one of the UK’s first lifestyle emporiums, on the King’s Road and the intervening years as Guild’s international reputation blossomed.
From exploring archival designs and artwork never seen before, to the techniques and processes used to create each new collection, and how the influences of nature, art and countries such as India, Japan and Scandinavia have always inspired her work, the exhibition proves perfect insight into the way Guild has managed to stay one step ahead of the zeitgeist and inspire others along the way. ‘Tricia was one of the main reasons I wanted to become an interior designer,’ says Kit Kemp, co-owner and creative director of Firmdale Hotels. ‘Her original mind and love of colour and textiles never disappoints – each season is a surprise and feast for the eye.’
So, too, is Guild’s aforementioned lifestyle store in Chelsea (there is a second shop in Marylebone), where she generously curates her own designs, from fabrics, wallpapers and furniture to cushions, bedlinen, tableware and accessories, with one-off ceramics (by favourite artisans like Kate McBride), artworks, jewellery, books and vintage pieces found on her travels. ‘It was always my aspiration to stimulate people and encourage a conversation about how to style their homes for themselves,’ she says. ‘The feel is multilayered because the living of life is multilayered.’
Of course, Guild’s name has become synonymous with colour – in big, bold, rich swathes of cobalt, magenta, turquoise, lime
and saffron, sometimes juxtaposed with the simplicity of black and white or softened with painterly pastel or ombre shades.
‘Colour can be strong, it can be energised, but there has to be a sort of harmony within it, too,’ Guild says. Interior designer and ELLE Decoration’s founding editor Ilse Crawford adds, ‘There is nothing beige about Designers Guild.’ Each range has a sense of the artist’s hand. Take the painterly brushstrokes in this season’s ‘Grandiflora Rose’ and ‘Magnolia’ prints, inspired by the late 19th-century Arts & Crafts garden designs of William Robinson. Or consider the collaborations with ceramicist Janice Tchalenko, painter Howard Hodgkin, decoupage designer John Derian and Christian Lacroix Maison’s Sacha Walckhoff.
Such artistry is only made possible by an innovative approach. The brand may be 50, but it’s always embraced new technologies and materials, such as working with rotary galvano and state-ofthe-art digital printing techniques to transform hand-drawn and painted designs into dramatic fabric repeats and wallpaper murals. The ‘Lisbon’ bouclé-style woven fabric collection, created from recycled redundant fashion industry textiles, has just been voted Best Fabric in the ELLE Decoration British Design Awards 2020. ‘I’m driven by the innovative quality of what I’m doing. Creating something that hasn't been done before – that’s what I find exciting, that’s how I’ve always worked,’ says Guild. designersguild.com ‘Out of the Blue: Fifty Years of Designers Guild’ until 14 June at the Fashion and Textile Museum; ftmlondon.org
ELLE Decoration Editor Ben Spriggs is in conversation with Tricia Guild on 30 April, 6-8pm, at the Fashion and Textile Museum. For tickets, priced £12, visit: ftmlondon.org