fabric designs of Lucienne Day

We spent last weekend in Washington, D.C., celebrating Bob's birthday. The highlight of the weekend for me was our trip to the Textile Museum, where they're currently exhibiting a collection of mid-century decorating fabrics -- mostly ones by the groundbreaking British designer, Lucienne Day. What a delight it was perusing this collection! It truly felt like we were looking at art.

Image courtesy of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

Something of a design celebrity in the 1950's and 60's, Lucienne made a name for herself designing fabrics that brought a colorful, modern sensibility to formerly gloomy post-war British living rooms. Her first big hit was "Calyx" (above), which she designed for a Festival of Britain dining room exhibit by her husband, furniture designer Robin Day. Heal, the fabric house she designed for, was so convinced that they wouldn't be able to sell this unusual new pattern, that they only paid her half her typical design fee. "Calyx" took the decorating world by storm, however, and ultimately Heal not only paid the other half of her fee but also went on to print and sell many more of her designs in this same vein.

Lucienne's subsequent fabrics continued what she introduced in Calyx: Playful and humorous abstract renditions of subjects from the natural world. An illustrated look inspired by modern artists such as Klee and Kandinsky. And cleverly disguised repeats that helped make the designs feel more like art, less like "patterns".

Over time, her signature look evolved, and she began introducing more geometrics -- in the form of typography, as broad blocks of color underlying the illustrations, and ultimately with large geometric shapes taking center stage.

If you fall in love with Lucienne Day's designs, you can purchase reproductions of some of her fabrics from the Glasgow School of Art (the source of the above images, except where noted). Expect to pay 75 pounds per meter, which works out to about $115 per yard at today's exchange rate. Or, save some money and instead get yourself a copy of Robin and Lucienne Day: Pioneers in Modern Design, available from Amazon.