THROUGH THE ARCHIVES FEATURE
Brintons sends out about 500-600 designs a week from their archive materials. The patterns enable the field designers to help their clients meet specific design briefs. Yvonne is responsible for this as well as constantly updating their collections through their partnerships with emerging and established designers.
New and exciting discoveries are still being made and one of Yvonne’s greatest finds was an important set of over 1000 Japanese stencils dating to around 1890. This led to Brintons producing a Katagami collection, which Yvonne says has done very well
commercially. The original stencils would have been used in Japan to dye patterns onto cloth and the Brintons collection is one of the largest in the world, with the exception of the Victoria and Albert museum. Yvonne has even loaned some of the stencils to museums in Japan and hosted Japanese academics who have come over to study the designs.
As well as providing inspiration for the Brintons designers, the collection is also used by high-profile collaborators such as Timorous Beasties who update beautiful botanical influences by playing with scale and colour. Another successful partnership has been with artist and designer, Christian Zuzunaga who was captivated by the archives. He found similarities between the antiquated hand-painted designs and his own design principals, which play on squared, pixel-based designs in brightly coloured palettes of contrasting colours.
The principles of great design is the same both for interiors and fashion and this is something that has been recognised by internationally acclaimed designers such as Vivienne Westwood and Manolo Blahnik who have both created stunning advertising campaigns for the company. In 1993 Brintons launched their first advertising campaign for which Vivienne Westwood designed a series of iconic carpet dresses.
A second Westwood designed campaign followed in 1995, based on dress styles from 1783, the year the company was founded. The photography for both campaigns was by David Bailey. The comparison between interiors and fashion doesn’t end there, with both Westwood and Brintons recognising that classic styles remain timelessly elegant. Westwood is known for her use of tartan on the catwalk and even today Brintons tartan collection remains the brand’s most popular pattern.
All designers look to the past for inspiration and as Geoffrey Chaucer noted in the 14th century: “There’s never a new fashion but it’s old.”
www.brintons.co.uk Tomorrow’s Retail Floors Autumn 2015 | 33
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