About eighteen months ago, Mickey and Maury Riad, the brothers who own and operate the Fortuny fabric house, invited me to collaborate with them on a collection of pillows for display and sale in the New York showroom. As readers of my work will know, Fortuny has a special place in my heart both as a person designing for a living, and as a person living with design (as I discuss at length in my earlier post about my Design Pilgrimage to Fortuny di Venezia).
We’ve been working on the collection of pillows for about a year now. As we get ready to launch them this winter, I wanted to open the door just a little bit to the process behind the designs.
I worked with several of the brand’s existing designs, and sought to expose new designs within the old designs. I wanted to perform a sort of pattern deconstruction on the designs we selected, and then reconstruct them in new ways that give rise to new designs within those old designs. This meant many late nights playing with the fabrics, their patterns, and my pencil.
It also meant several trips to the showroom to confirm actual measurements, since nothing about this fabric is standard or normal. Widths vary, borders play into the design (or not), and every dye-lot of the fabric is subtly different, thus making no two runs of the fabric ever alike.
Measuring the Ashanti pattern in the showroom
One of the signatures of the collection will be the exclusive use of only Fortuny fabrics. No outside trims, passementerie, or accent fabrics have been used. This meant not only using the fabric on the reverse, as is common with Fortuny, but also making use of the borders and selvedges, which are beautiful in their own right.
Cimarosa and its beautiful border, which features prominently in some of the designs!
We came up with about sixteen different designs, and made over forty pillows for the first preview and launch. The patterns used include Ashanti, Cimarosa, Tapa with Stripe, Rabat, Piumettes, Moresco, Mayan, Impero, Malmaison, Cuzco, and Canastrelli.
The collection also relies on dressmaker and couture-like sewing details; this is intentional and is both as an homage to Fortuny’s history as a dressmaker, and also reflects my obsession with precision in craftsmanship.
Marking and cutting the first pillow in the workroom.
Fortuny will be previewing the pillows from January 12th in the Fortuny New York showroom, where they will be available for sale and for order.
Look for more images soon…