Get into this video from the Spring 2012 campaign from the folks at Kate Spade NY featuring the work of textile designer Florence Broadhurst. I’m really digging the black and white graphic patterns paired with pops of neon color. From a design standpoint this is really cool – I’m all about black + white plus a pop of color (or two). Before seeing the video and checking out Kate Spade’s blog I’d never heard of Broadhurst. Just like Maija Isola at Marimekko, Broadhurst seems like a larger than life personality with equally large artistic talent. It’s nice to see female textile designers hitting it big now, and pattern/textile design coming more and more in fashion. I feel like the whole practice of textile and pattern design is finally starting to get the praise it deserves.
There’s an interesting article about Broadhurst on Architecture Digest here. AD writes,
There have been women in history, such as the hostesses of the 18thcentury Parisian salons, who had the charisma and the discrimination to gather talent around them and associate themselves with it. Florence Broadhurst—chanteuse in Shanghai in the 1920s, couturier on Bond Street in the ’30s, painter in Australia in the ’50s and designer of extraordinary wallpaper from the early ’60s until her brutal and unsolved murder in the ’70s—was such a personality. Broadhurst’s legacy of 530 hand-printed wallpapers was bought by David Lennie in 1989 as part of a 5,000-piece archive called Signature Prints. “The power is in the sheer size of her work,” says Lennie.
There is no question that it was Broadhurst’s larger-than-life personality, marked by a strident voice bursting from a slight frame under a dome of bright orange hair, that inspired the collection and marketed it. Without Florence Broadhurst, there would be no Florence Broadhurst wallpapers.
No such thing as too much pattern!
See – Black & White and neon – how great does that look?
Sweet suitcase.
The book – buying this today!
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