KAREN NICOL is a well-known British textile artist who works for some
new vintage
Embellished is a visual feast of a journey through the process of inspiration and creativity, illustrating the way in which pieces and processes influence new work and ideas. Combining elements as diverse as exotic feathers, plastic jewellery, buttons, and vintage millinery straw, Karen Nicol will inspire you to come up with lavish creations beyond your wildest dreams.
embellished
A beautiful, elegant, and visually intelligent look-book, Embellished contrasts vintage objects, collected over the years, with cutting-edge contemporary decoration for fashion and textiles. Showcasing a carefully chosen selection of techniques and materials, from tufting to using sequins, the author explores the potential in each of them, pushing materials to their absolute limits in order to create stunningly unique pieces. The author’s clients have included Clements Ribeiro, Matthew Williamson, John Rocha, Anthropologie and Designers Guild.
of the top designers in the world. Among her clients are Louella, Antonio Beradi, Pentagram, Whistles, Lulu Guinness, M&S and Courtaulds. She is a senior research fellow at the Royal College of Art.
KAREN NICOL
ISBN 978-1-4081-0575-7 9 0 1 0 0
9
781408 105757
embellished new vintage karen nicol
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contents
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foreword by inacio ribeiro
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subliminal inspiration
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cloth inspiring fashion and fashion inspiring cloth
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upcycling
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the sewn strip
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tufts
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foldover
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fagotting
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sequins
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pleats
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cut work
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foreword Karen’s flowers are explosions of shredded silks, nests of vintage ribbons, melted sequins, rotten lace and anything else that comes her way. Viciously stabbed and furiously steamed, they are the opposite of quaint and the antithesis of precious. Behind them is her voracious appetite for the original and the authentic, a passion for the overlooked and the discarded. She finds as much inspiration in car boot sale stalls as she does in Lesage archives as these places are not, for her, endless variations of museum documents or couture samples. As much as traditional embroidery can be exquisite (one of Karen’s favourite adjectives) it is in making it new and in re-inventing it that Karen has made her mission. Hers is the pursuit of what I could call ‘beyond beautiful’. I think every true artist has a journey to undertake, a learning curve in the process of mastering his or her craft. This journey moves from embracing the beautiful to finding a personal vocabulary beyond it, something fresh and relevant that reflects one’s inner workings as well as one’s times. In a world saturated with visual stimuli and an industry where the new is instantly dated, a fashion designer needs to develop a unique eye to capture beauty in unexpected ways in order to realise his or her vision. My wife Suzanne and I first met Karen when we started our fashion business, Clements Ribeiro. We have a vision for fashion that is deeply ingrained in tradition, but perversely intent on making it into something ironic and hip. Our first briefing to Karen involved densely embroidered dresses inspired by Brazilian outsider artist Bispo do Rosario, flowers meant to look exquisite but home made – possibly by the punk obsessed teenager that was our imaginary muse for the season. Karen leaped at it and our ‘Punk Trousseau’ collection became a template for all collections to 6
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come – a first of many collaborations over more than ten years. Since our first collaboration, we moved on to jellyfishes made out of vintage fringing and silica mouldings, glitter corsages, Raoul Dufy flowers made out of ripped satins and hand dyed chiffon rags, birds of all feathers, flora made from melted sequins, iridescent insects, zipper bouquets and eyelashes and much more. Karen’s work became one of the key elements of what came to amount to Clements Ribeiro style. In the process, Karen and I learned to work very closely together, exchanging inspiration, stimulating each other’s designs and pushing the boundaries of conventional embellishment. I would come with my bulging scrapbooks, and she would quickly whip up swatches or dig in her Aladdin’s cave of stuff for an element or three that would take the whole idea a step further. Alongside beautiful embroidery swatches (personal inventions as well as vintage), Karen has collected all sorts of quirky relics over the years: dirty old buttons, underwear boning, bits of old tapestry, dolls’ eyes, plastic jewellery, millinery trimmings – the flotsam and jetsam of life and industry, burnished by the patina of time, broken, stained, rotting perhaps, but bathed in poetic decay and pregnant with creative possibilities. These objects are a marvellous library of ‘beyond beautiful’. With an improbable shape or a unique colour, or rare texture, they seem to have a story of their own that Karen is determined to re-write. Her recent personal work has taken this process to another level. Karen’s subversive stitches have transformed her humble objets trouvees into a surreal menagerie on a tantalising scale. You stand in wonderment before highly textured beasts: bears dressed in taffeta, or monkeys with tattoos. This book is a visual journey through Karen’s eyes: from seeing the extraordinary in the banal and applying it to remarkable work for the fashion industry as well as her poetic and intriguing personal work – from ordinary to beautiful and beyond.
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subliminal inspiration This book was going to be about the treasure troves of inspiration in museums and galleries which stimulate me as a mixed-media textile designer. I’ve always loved wandering about with a notebook scribbling down ideas of how I could interpret shapes, textures and patterns to try to take embroidery out of its predictable confines. Our imaginations are only as rich as their input, so continuous ‘feeding’ is essential. I thought that I would concentrate on the simple sewing techniques used in embellishments found in dress galleries and how to develop them. I love to use this way of working myself, developing the ideas to create a more daring and contemporary attitude. The exquisite time-consuming techniques of the past have to go through a certain alchemy to become contemporary fashion embroidery. I began to look around my own studio and home for samples to illustrate the book. For decades, my husband collage artist Peter Clark and I have trawled flea markets and boot sales all over the world looking for the visual stimulus to be found amongst the wonderful unwanted junk and our home is a constantly changing gallery. My studio is like a frantic sketchbook page. I gather around me numerous collections of small, insignificant things, chosen in a magpie-like way. Put together, they begin to make palettes of ‘qualities’ to inform the senses. I am passionate about these values. The dryness or the waxiness, the silkiness or the pitted roughness, the fragility or the simple form, rearranging them to react to different influences can give a constantly shifting vocabulary. Texture and tactility play such a significant part in the craft, it is vital to keep stimulating these senses. 8
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When I began to look through my archives and collections I was absolutely shocked to find that subconsciously I had been influenced again and again by them. It was more like subliminal informing, seeing something with peripheral vision, like learning a language by listening to it in your sleep. My collections have had remarkable intuitive impact on my designs over the years. I realized I had a different message to tell: that the most important aspect of the book was to choose just a few techniques which fascinate me and then show the unintentional influences my vintage finds impose upon my work. The images of found pieces in this book are not the direct inspiration for the designs but the unconscious nourishment of them. Inspiration is not an insular thing. Physical and emotional properties from all around us crossreference each other to bring an idea to life and make it contemporary. We can look at the same piece of inspiration at various times and take something totally different from it depending upon what else is affecting us visually. It is of no benefit to mindlessly copy. We have to add the magic of our own personal way of seeing with the absorption of all the intangible stimulus which influences our viewpoint. ‘Fashion is like a big intestine. It digests everything around us - art, music, politics, the social worldto make a collection that people love. Because, without analyzing it too much, we absorb our surroundings.’ Jean Paul Gaultier The book begins with a selection of pieces made from vintage materials. Then just seven techniques out of the hundreds that manipulated and embroidered textiles have to offer are explored. Beautiful pictures of found pieces illustrate how this antique flotsam and jetsam can inform contemporary textiles. I chose these seven methods of working because they illustrate techniques which you can find in museums and galleries, and on vintage costume, and you can work out how to do them yourself. They don’t need particular skills or knowledge of embroidery stitches, all they need are to be seen with a creative and imaginative eye used in conjunction with the visual inspiration around us and a sense of irreverence. 11
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upcycling Designing with vintage materials can create something unique. The discerning eye of the buyer picks treasures out of piles of unwanted rubbish, each piece more special than the last because you can’t order it up or plan to find a specific item. With haberdashery, beads and ribbons, the high street seems to offer goods that all have a similar ‘quality’, even when they are copied from old examples. Many other designers are also trawling those same stores, but with vintage we can begin the design process with an individual and eclectic palette. Material-led design is often done in a subconscious way, with an intuitive decisionmaking process. With such a varied and unconventional palette the inclusion of contradicting elements in the design to prevent it looking predictable is easy. The danger when recycling vintage materials is that the resulting products look old and become a memorial for a bygone age.You must approach the pieces with an original and inventive imagination to allow for innovation.
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17 Flowers and leaves cut from the starched finely-woven fronts of old dress shirts with the label in the neck still attached.
18-19 A collection of over 200 one-off cashmere jumpers created in collaboration with Clements Ribeiro, all embellished with vintage finds. Car boot sales and flea markets were scoured all over Europe to look for the treasures to embellish these pieces. Best-quality cashmere jumpers and cardigans were bought in Scotland and re-dyed by hand to create beautiful and unique colours. One of the disadvantages of working with vintage finds is that no two are the same so this adds enormously to the time element in designing, as well as the cost and how buyers would be able to choose them. We created about ten ‘themes’ such as doily, voodoo, pearl, and buckle and very loosely based the collections around these so that buyers would be able to order by theme, approximate colour and size.
20-23 Conversation Pieces: An ongoing collection of vintage bags embellished with embroidery and vintage pieces. Each bag shows a dialogue representing some words of wisdom or joke between two creatures. The bags were sourced from car boot sales and vintage fairs and had to have a fabric base which could be sewn into. Often, the bags would be re-lined to make them pristine and the handles would be changed so that the vintage element was juxtaposed with something at odds with its original concept and made more contemporary.
25 A necklace made of vintage lace and hand sewn leather with plastic and bone toy animals inspired by carvings round the Duomo in Florence Photo by Guto
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26 Old Victorian braids have been knotted and woven to ‘draw’ a scene on this St George and the Dragon skirt. Worked on an organza background, the braids were machined down with a free needle in swirls and flowers. St George on horseback, birds, butterflies and an angel were also worked in the same way. The organza was then cut away from behind the creatures and held together with stitching in transparent thread.
31 This cardigan was a design for Anthropologie in New York. Spots of Suffolk puff patchwork made using small prints and turned to their ungathered side were scattered over the cashmere.
29 Found at flea markets in France, antique straw and raffia braids often used in millinery were gathered together to create this piece. Fabric shapes were made for each component of the lobster by sewing and weaving the braids together or weaving with fine rouleaux. They were then moulded to the necessary shapes and machined together.
33 Paloma Bear made from a vintage French printed linen church sack. The decorative shapes were cut out and reassembled after being stiffened and shaped. The face and paws worked on an Irish machine using two threads at once through a large-size needle so that the colours could be finely mixed.
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tufts Traditional ‘pegged’ or ‘broded’ rugs were first made in England in the 1800s by poking small fabric pieces through a woven cloth foundation. Hooked rugs were first made at the end of the 19th century influenced by commercial patterns manufactured in America. At this time, leftover scraps and old clothes were utilized to make floor coverings. A hook is used to pull short strips of cloth (about 25mm x 80mm) through hessian backcloth. There is no need to knot the strips when making a rug this way because the more pieces of cloth are used in the hessian, the tighter the weave becomes. The hessian grips the cloth bits and keeps them from coming out again. These rugs gave women a chance to make pictures and geometric designs and are a fantastic source of untrained creative expression. Hooked rugs have been called ‘America’s one indigenous folk art’. This wonderful textile technique can be reproduced with 21st century speed using long continuous strips of cloth and a sewing machine. A torn strip of cloth, ribbon or a bunch of thick thread is attached to the ground fabric at one end with a few stitches then the strip is looped and a few more stitches added to hold it down. The loops can be any thickness or length. In the following images, I have used chiffons and solid fabrics – frayed or smooth. Also, like the beautiful vintage cream and blue matt, the loops can be cut to make tufts and fringing, again at any length. It is easiest to do this using a free needle, with no protective foot to get in the way, and with the backing fabric pulled tight in an embroidery ring.
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cut work Access to laser cutters is becoming easier and cheaper, and as a result beautiful laces and cut works are being created straight from the computer onto cloth. For mass production and much design for industry, technology has pushed this field forwards into the future, but it shouldn’t replace the idea of cutting by hand as a design tool entirely. There are times, especially if the design needed is not too small and intricate, when it is actually beneficial to work by hand. The design can then be transferred easily to mechanical means later. Sometimes CAD restricts creativity; the immediacy of the design is lost when we have to plot something out before we see what it looks like. We lose the chance to draw with a pair of scissors in a spontaneous way, to change shape and scale at whim with fresh hand-eye co-ordination. In mixed-media textilesI feel there is a direct relationship between doing and creating – it’s almost as though we think through our hands. Our brains seem to only take us so far with an idea and then we sometimes need to be working practically to make other leaps of imagination, as though a subconscious part of our thinking takes over. The images in this part of the book try to show how hand-cutting can allow a real freedom of expression. It allows us to use cutwork in the middle of a print or piece of embroidery that would be onerous to plot on a laser cutter. Cutting can be done between two layers of fabric stretched at different tensions and we can see here how cutting can be a mark-making tool like a pencil, retaining individual characteristics in the cut shapes.
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Photo by Chris Moore 192
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187 This image was an unused sample for a project by Markus Lupfer, the hair hand-cut unevenly to look like a wood cut. The simple qualities of wood cut, colour block shadow, scribble and the lips give it a real purity.
189 This semi-circular skirt is from a collection called ‘Lace, to Add a Dash of Spirit’ for the Rebecca Hossack Gallery. It has rich Irishembroidered, loosely-drawn flowers which frame holiday postcard embroideries done in wool. A cut work of leaves is done by hand between the heavy embellishments.
193 This cut work started life trying to answer a brief by Clement Ribeiro to create an all-over embroidery inspired by the amazing prints of Zandra Rhodes. To try to make a stitch design covering the cloth with pattern was far too complex and expensive so the problem was solved using a simple sewn line, cut on tensioned fabric. The patterns sprung up as a texture when the tension was released.
195 A hand-painted fabric for interiors made with the same cut technique as 193 but using taffeta backed by a silk tulle so that the design flutters and lets the light through when the fabric moves.
191 An uncomplicated technique made by sewing together hand-cut circles. The mix of a springy opaque fabric and organza gives an interesting and more contemporary look.
197 A monkey made from layers of stitched and hand-cut bonded taffeta for the ‘Conversation Pieces’ collection at the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery. The face and tail were embroidered on the Irish machine.
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199 A simple lattice-work of cut and bonded strips of fabric in layers of white and cream were inspired by rough grasses used in flower arranging. This piece was designed for a bridal project for Bruce Oldfield.
203 Fabric for a Bamford Spring/ Summer collection worked with Alison Young. Two of each of the damask shapes were cut and trapped slightly out of line with each other between two layers of organza, the bottom superfluous layer of organza was then trimmed back. Small decorative holes were stitched and burned out with a pyrographer.
201 A fabric for interior screens in hand-cut leather. The design developed from research into the exquisite rough Japanese basketwork where there is a control in the chaos of the natural wood.
205 Digitally printed from a photograph of the wood on Santa Monica pier, the fabric for this bear is pieced together for the body and then formed into ‘carvings’ inspired by the master wood carver Grinlin Gibbons.
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First published in Great Britain 2011 A&C Black Publishers an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP ISBN: 9781408105757 Text copyright © Karen Nicol 2011 All images copyright © Karen Nicol 2011, unless otherwise stated
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Karen Nicol has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form orby any means – graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems – without the prior permission in writing from the publishers. Page design: Bradbury and Williams Cover design: Sutchinda Rangsi Thompson Publisher: Susan James This book is produced using paper that is made from wood grown in managed, sustainable forests. It is natural, renewable and recyclable. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. Printed and bound in China
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