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    Hemingway Design and James Shaw create furniture from recycled clothes for Traid

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    Local studio Hemingway Design collaborated with designer James Shaw to transform a London store interior for charity retailer Traid, which features colourful furniture created from leftover second-hand clothes.

    Hemingway Design renovated Traid’s Shepherd’s Bush branch as part of a wider rebrand for the retailer to mark its 25th anniversary, including its visual identity.
    Hemingway Design has redesigned the Traid store in Shepherd’s Bush, LondonTraid sells donated clothing and accessories in 12 stores across London to fund global projects that tackle the issues caused by producing, consuming and wasting textiles.
    As part of the Shepherd’s Bush store refurbishment, Hemingway Design worked with Shaw to create furniture out of poor-quality clothes salvaged from the Traid sorting warehouse that the retailer deemed unsellable.
    James Shaw created furniture and lighting made from recycled clothesShaw, whose practice centres on repurposing waste materials, created curved pendant lighting from the leftover clothes, which were shredded back to fibres and combined with a plant-based binder.

    The designer applied this method to make the rest of the furniture. One piece is a low-slung bench for trying on shoes, upholstered with a yellow, green and blue patchwork of old denim jeans and corduroy trousers.
    Shaw designed the bench’s lumpy legs in his trademark extruded HDPE plastic, finished in the same colours as the patchwork seat.
    This included changing room door handlesElsewhere in the store, boxy pinewood changing room doors feature multicoloured handles created from the leftover clothes, defined by a speckled appearance thanks to the combination of shredded fibres.
    Silver scaffolding previously used for a different purpose in the original shop layout was used to create a “staff picks” clothes rail positioned at the front of the store.
    The designer combined shredded fibres with a plant-based binder. Photo by James Shaw”To align with Traid’s manifesto of reducing waste and prolonging the lifespan of items, a fundamental objective of the refurb was to reuse and repurpose existing fixtures and fittings within the store where possible,” explained Hemingway Design.
    British designer Charlie Boyden created chunky pastel-hued plinths from other offcuts and materials salvaged from the strip-out. They display merchandise in the shop window illuminated by more of Shaw’s clothing-based pendant lighting.
    Existing silver scaffolding was used to form a “staff picks” clothes railSwirly linseed-based oil-stained pine also characterises the geometric cash desk, fitted with an accessible counter and positioned in front of an existing timber stud wall painted in bold pink.
    Next to the counter, bespoke bright green Unistrut shelving creates additional space for hanging clothes and displaying shoes.

    Previously unrecycleable clothing made into Fibers Unsorted textile

    According to Hemingway Design, Traid has put 228 million garments back into use to date, saving 622,059 tonnes of carbon dioxide and 105.3 million cubic metres of water.
    “The charity retailer maximises the potential of the clothes you no longer wear, demanding change from a throwaway, fast fashion culture that continues to destroy this planet,” said the studio.
    Charlie Boyden designed display plinths using off-cutsShaw recently applied his extruded plastic designs to another store renovation in central London for shoe brand Camper, which includes a jumbo foot sculpture.
    Hemingway Design previously created a minimalist but colourful logo to celebrate 100 years of the Dreamland amusement park in Margate, Kent.
    The photography is by French & Tye unless stated otherwise. 

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      Patrick Carroll presents knitted “paintings” at JW Anderson store

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      Artist Patrick Carroll has used recycled yarn to create hand-knitted painting-style pieces for the Days textile exhibition at JW Anderson’s Milan store during Milan design week.

      Carroll presented translucent artworks that look “as if they are paintings”, which were made using a 1970s flatbed domestic knitting machine and displayed on wooden stretcher bars – the skeleton of a traditional art canvas – in the store.
      Days is a textile exhibition by Patrick Carroll”My stuff is a little bit transparent – you can see the architecture of it all,” Carroll told Dezeen at the JW Anderson flagship store in Milan, where the work is exhibited in a show called Days.
      “I was making clothing initially,” he explained, donning one of his own pink creations.
      The pieces are on display at Milan’s JW Anderson storeCarroll decided to apply his practice to artworks, designing pieces made from yarn salvaged from remainder shops that liquidate the fashion industry’s leftover textiles rather than sourcing new materials.

      Recycled wool, linen, mohair, silk and cashmere all feature in the rectilinear works, which are finished in colours ranging from coral to aqua to ochre.
      They range from big to smallLike Carroll’s clothing, each piece was characterised by one or a handful of words lifted from sources including literature, existing artworks or the artist’s own writing.
      The smallest pieces in the collection were displayed on gridded shelving while larger pieces can be found on various walls throughout the store.
      When viewed together, the works were position to create a “modular chorus”, explained the artist, who encouraged viewers to form their own relationships with the words weaved into the textiles.

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      Days follows Carroll’s first collaboration with JW Anderson in 2022 when the artist designed seven knitted outfits for the brand. The clothes were worn by models posing on chunky blue plinths positioned outside the venue of JW Anderson’s Spring Summer 2023 menswear show in Milan.
      “I think what makes the works a little bit unique is that they have legs in all these disciplines – fashion, design and art,” added Carroll.
      Carroll’s artworks display a mix of single words and phrasesFounded by Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson, JW Anderson previously created hoodies and tailored shorts moulded from plasticine for its Spring Summer 2024 womenswear show at London Fashion Week.
      Various other fashion brands have a presence at this year’s Milan design week. Hermès has created an installation that uses reclaimed bricks, slate, marble and terracotta to draw attention to the brand’s artisan roots while Marimekko has transformed a traditional Milanese bar into a flower-clad day-to-night cafe.
      The photography is courtesy of Patrick Carroll and JW Anderson. 
      Days is on display from 17 to 21 April 2024 at the JW Anderson store, Via Sant’Andrea 16, Milan. See our Milan design week 2024 guide on Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks taking place throughout the week.

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      Barbican’s Unravel exhibition explores the subversive power of textiles

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      Curator Lotte Johnson discusses the transformative power of textiles in this video produced by Dezeen for the Barbican’s latest exhibition.

      Titled Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, the exhibition examines how textiles have been employed to explore themes spanning power, oppression, gender and belonging.
      It features over 100 works that make use of textile, fibre and thread from over 50 artists from across the globe, spanning from the 1960s to the present day.
      The exhibition explores how artists have used textiles to express their lived experienceThe exhibition is designed to challenge the perception of textiles being solely domestic or craft practices and instead features textile works that relate a story of resistance and rebellion as well as pieces that present narratives of emancipation and joy.
      Johnson explained that textiles offer a meaningful medium to express personal and political issues due to their tactile nature and intimate connection to daily life.

      “Textiles are one of the most under-examined mediums in art history and in fact history itself,” Johnson said. “They are an intrinsic part of our everyday lives. When we’re born, we’re shrouded in a piece of fabric. Everyday we wrap ourselves in textiles,” she continued.
      “They’re really this very intimate, tactile part of our lives and therefore perhaps the most intrinsic, meaningful way to express ourselves.”
      Feminist artist Judy Chicago’s Birth Project depicts birth as a mystical and confrontational processThe exhibition is structured into six thematic sections. The first, called Subversive Stitch, presents works that challenge binary conceptions of gender and sexuality.
      The section includes feminist artist Judy Chicago’s Birth Project, which vividly depicts the glory, pain and mysticism of giving birth, as well as a piece from South African artist Nicholas Hlobo, which, despite initially appearing as a painting, is made using ribbon and leather stitched into a canvas.
      Another section of the exhibition is titled Bearing Witness, which brings together artists who employ textiles to confront and protest political injustices and systems of violent oppression.
      Artist Teresa Margolles creates collective tapestries that trigger conversations on police brutalityIncluded in this section are tapestries by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles that commemorate the lives of individuals including Eric Garner and Jadeth Rosano López.
      Garner was an African-American man killed in 2014 by NYPD police officer Daniel Pantaleo, who put Garner into a chokehold during arrest. López was a seventeen-year old-girl assassinated in Panama City.
      Margolles used fabric that had been placed in contact with the victims’ deceased bodies and collaborated with embroiderers from their respective local communities to create the tapestries.
      The Wound and Repair sections includes work from American artist and activist Harmony Hammond’s Bandaged Grid series, in which layered fabric is used to evoke imagery reminiscent of an injured body.
      Tau Lewis’ fabric assemblages offer new narratives of black historiesWhile violence and brutality are key themes examined in the exhibition, it also showcases how textiles can be used to create narratives of hope. The final, most expansive section of the exhibition is titled Ancestral Threads, which encompasses works created to inspire a sense of optimism and reconnect with ancestral practices.
      “This section not only explores artists processing exploitative and violent colonial and imperialist histories, but also celebrates the artists who are re-summoning and relearning ancient knowledge systems to imagine a different kind of future,” Johnson explained.
      Canadian multimedia artist Tau Lewis’s work titled The Coral Reef Preservation Society is a patchwork assemblage of recycled fabrics and seashells including fragments of textured denim.
      The work pays homage to the enslaved women and children thrown overboard in the Middle Passage, the historical transportation route used during the Atlantic slave trade. These women and children have been reimagined as underwater sea creatures to transform the narrative into one of regeneration.
      Vicuña revives the art of the quipu in her installation Quipu AustralA large installation by Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña titled Quipu Austral is situated towards the end of the exhibition. The installation takes the form of billowing ribbons hanging from the ceiling.
      Vicuña references quipu, a form of recording used by a number cultures in Andean South America. Quipu was a ancient writing system which used knotted textile cords to communicate information.

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      Other sections in the exhibition include Fabric of Everyday, which explores the daily uses of textiles, as well as Borderlands, which examines how textiles have been used to challenge ideas around belonging.
      These sections feature works such as Shelia Hicks’ colourful woven bundles and Margarita Cabrera’s soft sculpture cacti crafted from reclaimed US border patrol uniforms.
      Mexican-American artist Margarita Cabrera uses reclaimed border patrol uniforms in her work”We hope that people might come out of this exhibition feeling invigorated and moved by the stories of resilience and rebellion embedded in the work but also hope and emancipation,” Johnson said.
      “I hope that the show might inspire people to pick up a needle and thread themselves and use it to express their own lived experience.”
      The show is a partnership between the Barbican and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and was co-curated by Barbican curators Johnson, Wells Fray-Smith and Diego Chocano, in collaboration with Amanda Pinatih from the Stedelijk.
      Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art is at the Barbican Centre until 26 May 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.
      Partnership content
      This video was produced by Dezeen for the Barbican Centre as part of a partnership. Find out more about Dezeen’s partnership content here.

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      Kustaa Saksi creates vivid oversized tapestries to explore “reality and illusion”

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      Multidisciplinary designer Kustaa Saksi has unveiled In the Borderlands, an exhibition of jacquard textiles at the Helsinki Design Museum, which includes pieces featuring scenery generated by AI software.

      Conceived as objects that straddle both art and design, Saksi’s large-scale textiles were hung from the ceilings and arranged across various rooms within a gallery at Helsinki’s Design Museum.
      Ideal Fall is a duo of tapestries featuring AI-generated imageryTo create his pieces, the designer uses jacquard weaving – a technique invented in 1804 where patterns are woven with yarn using a loom to create a textile, rather than printed, embroidered or stamped onto fabric.
      Ideal Fall is a series of two oversized tapestries featuring bright and abstract forms depicting waterfall- and plant-style forms.
      Kustaa Saksi also created a series exploring migrainesSaksi created the colourful duo of textiles using AI software, which he instructed to generate images that would depict “ideal” scenes of nature. The designer then picked his favourite suggestions and used the imagery as a stimulus for the tapestries’ patterns.

      “The exhibition explores moments between reality and illusion, which are the starting point for many of Saksi’s works,” said the Design Museum.
      The tapestries were suspended from the ceiling at the Design MuseumMigraine Metamorphoses is another series of textiles featuring similarly bold designs, which Saksi created to refer to the various phases of migraines – intense headaches that the designer has suffered since the age of seven.
      According to the museum, the soft texture of the textiles intends to “mitigate the painful subject matter”.
      Monsters and Dreams is a series informed by stories about hallucinationsOften influenced by the boundaries between dreams and imagination, Saksi’s first-ever tapestry series was also on show at the Design Museum.
      Called Monsters and Dreams, it is characterised by striking patterns that take cues from hallucinations experienced by one of the designer’s family members. These textiles were draped across or hung from the ceiling of a single room with dark blue walls, which had been painted to enhance the pieces’ dramatic theme.

      Stockholm Furniture Fair installation by Gert Wingårdh and Kustaa Saksi

      Saksi has created his pieces in collaboration with Dutch studio TextileLab since 2013.
      “The jacquard technique can be referred to as one of the early precursors to the computer,” said the Design Museum.
      “It was the first mechanised technique which enabled the transfer of information about a particular pattern to a weaving machine with the help of a punched cylinder, to eventually become a piece of textile.”
      The exhibition is on display in Helsinki until mid-OctoberThroughout the gallery, the textiles were illuminated with controlled levels of lighting in order to preserve their appearance, according to the museum.
      In the Borderlands is on display until 15 October as part of the museum’s 150th-anniversary programme. Elsewhere at Helsinki Design Week, designer Didi NG Wing Yin presented a series of amorphous timber furniture while last year’s edition of the event featured projects including plant-based textiles.
      The photography is by Paavo Lehtonen.
      Helsinki Design Week takes place from 8 to 17 September 2023 in Helsinki, Finland. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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      Printed textiles are “not just an accessory but something that can create a space” says Marimekko creative director

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      Bold colours and prints can enhance interiors in the same way as architectural details, argues Rebekka Bay of lifestyle brand Marimekko in this interview.

      Bay was appointed creative director of the Finnish design firm in 2020 having previously held top roles at fashion brands including Everlane, Cos and Uniqlo.
      Founded in 1951, Marimekko is known for its bright and bold prints that are applied to clothing, ceramics and homeware.
      Bay talked to Dezeen about how printed textiles can add spatial design to interiors. Photo courtesy of MarimekkoMore than just decorative pieces, Bay believes Marimekko’s patterned surfaces can be used as features to define and create interior spaces.
      “Often printed textiles are confused with this idea of just being like a drape or a tablecloth, but really when we develop printed textiles at Marimekko we see them as architectural elements, something that can also add spatial design or architectural elements to your home,” she told Dezeen.

      “They are not just an accessory, but actually something that can create a space.”
      Marimekko collaborated with IKEA on a homeware collection informed by wellbeingIn the wake of coronavirus lockdowns, the ability of colourful prints to improve wellbeing and happiness in the home has become increasingly valuable, Bay added.
      “The role of the home is increasingly important because we have all been forced to relate to what our home environment is and how it supports our wellbeing,” she said.
      “There is a renewed understanding of the importance of creating a home environment that will allow you to both rest and re-energise.”
      “Being surrounded by bold beauty is something that evokes happiness or optimism,” Bay continued.
      References to Marimekko’s and IKEA’s Nordic heritage are seen throughout their collaborationPicking up on this trend, Marimekko recently collaborated with Swedish furniture retailer IKEA to create a homeware collection named Bastua, which includes furniture, glassware and textiles informed by nature and the self-care rituals of the Nordic sauna.
      Drawing on the brands’ Nordic heritage, the Bastua collection features practical home objects made from wood and glass.
      Bay said the collaboration aimed to focus on circularity and longevity.

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      “What we share both at Marimekko and IKEA is that in the design process, we are concerned with how to design for circularity, how to design for longevity, how to design objects of timeless value and also multi-use objects,” she said.
      “Our intent in this collaboration was to design objects that will have this timeless value, both in terms of the design but also in terms of material.”
      “We have worked in very honest natural materials with glass and wood and other materials that improve over time and also focused on how the materials can be either recycled or upcycled.”
      The rhubarb leaf is a repeated motif in the Bastua collectionMarimekko developed brand new prints for the Bastua collection, including a large rhubarb-leaf design that references the plants often found growing beside sauna buildings in Finland.
      This print was applied to bath robes, seat cushions, shower curtains, trays and the iconic IKEA carrier bag.
      “Functionalism and pragmatism joins this idea of celebrating everyday objects, which is very much a product of Marimekko’s mission – to bring joy to people’s everyday lives,” said Bay.
      “I think for Nordic designers, we have strong design traditions in creating very beautiful but very functional, democratic design.”
      Bay believes bold, colourful prints can add happiness to the homeIn addition, she emphasised a desire to inject an element of humour into the designs.
      “At times it’s very subtle and very serious, but I think what is unique to both Marimekko and IKEA is this intent also to bring a smile or a wink,” she continued.
      “There’s something outside of the seriousness, wanting to develop truly high-quality, timeless design but also wanting to bring this little wink.”
      Bay enjoys creating collections that “bring a smile or a wink”Marimekko has accrued a large portfolio of prints over its seven decades of production and still reproduces archive designs.
      The brand’s historic prints are used to inform new print designs that it hopes will resonate with modern consumers.
      “I think there’s always this danger if you only look back that you end up being self-referential, or you end up being an archive or a museum piece,” said Bay.

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      “I would hate to create something of only museum value and not create a proposal for the future,” she added.
      “There is this always looking back in order to look forward, always understanding what has resonated, what has broad relevance and then see if we can reposition or refocus that.”
      Other projects recognisable for their bold textile designs that have been featured on Dezeen include a collection of upholstery fabrics informed by Iranian culture and an exhibition that celebrates a 1940s print by using it to cover walls and seating.
      The photography is courtesy of Inter IKEA Systems BV unless otherwise stated.

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