Getting Dressed: Kaffe Fassett Brigid Keenan
‘My mother gave me a totally different slant on colour from the word go’
Kaffe Fassett is the man who put charisma into crafts. Nothing in the staid Women’s Institute world of knitting, patchwork or needlepoint was quite the same after his arrival on the scene in the Seventies. What Mary Quant did for fashion, Fassett did for knitters and needlepersons (men embroider too). Perhaps it needed an outsider to inject new life into these traditional skills: Kaffe (pronounced Kaif) came to Britain from Big Sur in California, where his parents ran a well-known restaurant, Nepenthe. His original purpose was to paint, but he became friendly with the fashion designer Bill Gibb, who took him to Scotland to stay with his parents. Fassett was captivated by the colours of the Highland landscape and when he came across a range of knitting wools in the same subtle tones, it fired his imagination and he bought wool and needles, and persuaded a passenger on the train ride back to London to teach him to knit. He broke the rules, mixing his colours in startling ways, and Vogue
Knitting magazine published his patterns. Then his knitwear was shown with Bill Gibb’s collection and Vogue itself took him up.
Fassett went on to design needlepoint tapestries for rugs and cushions, abandoning the usual prim and pastel flower patterns for giant roses, cabbages, aubergines, leeks and artichokes. And here I have to declare an interest: I commissioned his first needlepoint kit for a Sunday Times offer – a cushion in a bold Persian carpet pattern. The kit was made by Ehrman (www. ehrmantapestry.com), which has since sold more than 300,000 kits designed by Fassett. Soon he became involved in patchwork and fabric design, and in 1980 he became the first living textile designer to have his own show at the V&A.
Aged 79, Fassett still teaches and exhibits all over the world, and has published forty books. His first, Glorious Knitting, has sold 400,000 copies, and his latest, Bold Blooms, is a feast for the eyes and seems to be heading for similar success. Colour is what drives Fassett: in his company you see everything in a different way – almost literally with rose-tinted glasses. For him, a stack of rusty tins becomes a palette of reds, oranges and yellows, lichen on a tree stump is a world of silvery browns and greys. He puts his passion for colour down to his mother, the daughter of a painter, who used to take him to Chinatown in San Francisco when he was a boy: ‘She loved everything oriental and showed me the brilliant fabrics, the clothes, the dolls – and this gave me a totally different slant on colour from the word go.’
Fassett has a signature outfit, the same every day: a colourful shirt (from Robert Graham or Paul Smith) worn with easy trousers (from anywhere) and brightly coloured socks (Paul Smith or found while travelling) and, when he goes out, a small bright scarf tucked around his neck (also random buys when on the move). In our picture he is wearing a shirt he made out of a printed cotton by Keiko Goke (www.keikogoke.com), a Japanese designer and patchwork maker. He loves the subtlety of Japanese textile design and tends to buy up rolls of fabric he sees there. ‘They have a sensibility about colour, their combinations are extraordinary.’ When he travels he wears dark blue shirts and trousers: ‘Like the scene changers in Japanese theatre: you are not supposed to notice them, or me.’
Fassett never sits idle, his hands are always busy knitting, embroidering or drawing, and his social life takes second place to work. He owns one suit, by Paul Smith (he mourns an Armani outfit he had that got eaten by moths). ‘The worst thing I ever bought was a white suit – it was because I thought we were going to have a long, hot “sangria” summer.’ ‘No!’ laughs Brandon Mably, Fassett’s partner and studio manager (also a designer); ‘It was because you thought you would look like John Travolta in Grease!’ ‘The long hot summer never happened,’ continues Kaffe, ‘so I painted the suit all over with leaves and went to a costume party as the Green Man.’ (They show me the suit and it is exquisite, a work of art.)
Fassett’s favourite garment is the short puffer coat by Uniqlo. ‘I love these jackets, they are light, and fold up into nothing, but really warm, too. They demonstrate the Japanese flair for colour as well – I have two, one in a great green and one in a rich mediaeval brown.’
Fassett’s tall, lean Californian figure has not altered much over the years. He walks one and a half miles to a gym five times a week, where he does some gentle exercise, has a swim and then catches the Tube back. He washes his face with ordinary soap and has his hair cut by a Turkish barber in Kilburn, where he lives. ‘I discovered when I travelled in the Middle East that Arabs and Turks really know how to take care of men – they know about trimming eyebrows, noses, ears, and they always end up giving you a warm cloth to wipe over your face which makes you feel wonderful.’
Go to www.kaffefassett.com to find out lots more, including stockists for his work. His colouring book for grown-ups,
Adventures in Color, was published in February.