Liberty of London is famed for its floral and paisley fabrics. But now, to mark its 150th anniversary, the department store is launching a new range of modernist textiles featuring abstract designs.
The team at Liberty has collaborated with 93-year-old Italian designer Federico Forquet on FuturLiberty, a collection inspired by the Italian futurists and British vorticists – artistic movements from the early 20th century that celebrated the vitality of modern life. In doing so, they’ve also brought the late designer Bernard Nevill back into the spotlight.
Mary-Ann Dunkley, Liberty’s design director, says the initial idea was to have a creative conversation with Forquet. No one predicted that it would lead to more than 100 textile designs, a duo of Milanese exhibitions curated by the art historian Ester Coen, and an accompanying coffee-table book.
Born in Naples, Forquet originally worked alongside the couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga in Paris during the mid-1950s. He established his own fashion house in 1961, dressing clients including Diana Vreeland and Faye Dunaway, earning him the moniker “the Italian Dior”. He quit fashion to pursue his love of interiors and gardens.
Dunkley says: “The first thing he told us was ‘you do florals very well but I want to set you a challenge’,” as he unveiled a series of geometric artworks from the futurists, explaining their manifesto was to break with the 19th-century romanticism and embrace the modern industrial revolution.
Although Dunkley loved the inspiration, she was concerned that she would struggle to find a Liberty connection with it. However, after combing the vast fabric archive held in a former military bunker in Oxfordshire and spanning more than 50,000 designs dating back to the 1800s, Dunkley and head archivist Anna Buruma came upon the works of former Liberty design director Bernard Nevill. Two of his collections, Jazz (1965) and Tango (1967) were inspired by vorticism, a British art movement that grew out of futurism. Nevill taught fashion superstars Ossie Clark and Zandra Rhodes before becoming Liberty’s design director, and he had a huge influence on 60s style.
Forquet had met Nevill in the 1970s, describing his Chelsea home – which featured in the film Withnail and I as Uncle Monty’s London house – as an “Aladdin’s cave”. That house was one of various properties owned by Nevill, where he kept a remarkable collection of pre-Raphaelite artefacts, Victoriana, art, fabrics and furniture. Fittingly, the building was headquarters for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. It was originally built for the artist George Boyce.
In Coen’s book on FuturLiberty, Forquet says of Nevill: “He was enormously knowledgable about art, the applied arts, and endlessly curious.
“At the same time, he was well known for his innovative work as a graphic designer and for his leading role in the trends of the 1960s.”
Nevill was referred to as “the print king”, says Dunkley. “Once we found that link, we were so excited. These types of prints aren’t what we are commercially known for, so it was scary.”
Forquet encouraged the design team to explore new techniques. Rejecting the use of screens, he would sometimes wander off to his garden during a meeting to fetch a certain leaf from a bush to illustrate a certain type of green.
“He was obsessed with the fact that no line should be perfect, so they were all hand drawn. If an edge was too perfect he would take a pencil and draw on top of the paper to ensure it wasn’t straight,” says Dunkley.
A print from David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust jumpsuit worn in 1972 has also been reimagined and dubbed “Future Federico”. The famous Ziggy outfit was made from the Nevill fabric “Corbusier”, named after the modernist architect, Le Corbusier, picked out by Bowie’s tailor Freddie Burretti. Nevill only found out it had been chosen when he saw it on the album cover of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust.
“When you look at Forquet’s own work, you can see that he has a sense of the time and what people both want and need in that aesthetic,” says Dunkley. “It was always meant to be a collection that surprised (consumers), but I never imagined it would lead to so much joy.”
