Our industry is full of entrepreneurial, ambitious, creative, talented, people. I feel very lucky to know so many of them, including the textile designer Sina Pearson.
Ms. Pearson’s career spans more than 40 years. She has served as the Director of Textiles at Jens Risom Design and as head of the textile division at Brickell Associates under the tutelage of Ward Bennett, and ultimately became President and Director of Design at Unika Vaev. In 1985 she co-founded the Association for Contract Textiles, ACT, and in 1990 she founded Sina Pearson Textiles. In 2016 she sold her eponymous company to the Momentum Group, where she continues to design outstanding fabric collections. She is widely acknowledged as one of the most important textile designers in the industry.
This past week, I caught up with her for a discussion of her life, career and the work she’s contributed to the design community.
Bob Beck (BB): Tell us about your early life. Where did you come from? How did you get to be a textile designer?
Sina Pearson (SP): I’m from Seattle, but I live in New York City where I’ve lived for about 40 years. Growing up in Seattle I feel I was under three big cultural influences:
>I’m the granddaughter of four Swedish immigrants from 1900, so I’ve always felt very Scandinavian.
>We had a summer house on the Swinomish Indian Reservation, so I always felt very close to the artistic traditions of the Pacific Northwest Native American people. We had a totem pole at our house, and I have a totem pole at my beach house in Seattle. This was an important part of my life also.
>Japanese vegetation and Japanese culture are very big in the Pacific Northwest. My mother was a landscape designer, and she always had the kind of plant material you would find in Japan around our property. We actually had a bamboo forest in our backyard. Now, as I look over my design career I can see major influences from each of these three things.
In 1963, when I was 15 and my brother was 17, our parents pulled us out of school for five months and took us on a road trip through Europe. That was before there were many Americans traveling there, but my parents wanted to meet our relatives in Sweden and believed it would be a life changing experience for us – and it was. When I look at photos of that trip (pictured), I see certain themes – look at the sweaters – that just keep reappearing in my work. In fact, that sweater I was wearing when I was 15 is emblematic of how I felt when I was growing up.
My father was an engineer at Boeing, but he was also an avid photographer, so when we traveled as a family my dad always talked f-stop, and my mother always talked plants. They were very creative and encouraged me to study textiles.
BB: So where did you study?
SP: I went to the University of Washington where I majored in Art. Luckily I had a professor who was a fabulous mentor, and he let me do independent study for a couple of years, so I took weaving. We could go into a yarn room and pick out any colors we wanted, and I find that the colors I was drawn to then still find their way into much of my work, for instance that red/orange I still use in all the collections I design.
When I was finishing up at the University of Washington, my mentor suggested I go to Cranbrook. I didn’t even know what Cranbrook was, but when I got there I found it to be an incredible opportunity. At that time Cranbrook was an art school, so we were taught to be artists, not designers. We were given a studio, and there were a few students for every teacher. I was there from 1970 to 1972, and I graduated with an MFA degree in Fiber.
BB: With your MFA in hand, where did you first find employment?
SP: Well, I was just sort of hanging around waiting for another door of opportunity to open when SOMChicago called Cranbrook wanting a recent Cranbrook grad to work as their color and material specialist in the interiors department. So I moved to Chicago and worked at SOM, where my mentors were Robert Kleinschmidt and Don Powell. My year there was a great experience – it introduced me to the worlds of architecture and interior design that I’d never really thought much about before. It was my introduction to this industry.
But after only a year there, I got a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Arts and Crafts School in Stockholm. I was fluent in Swedish since my undergraduate minor was Swedish Language and Culture, so off I went to study in Stockholm. While there I visited museums where I saw traditional textiles and patterns that really spoke to me – like that sweater – the colors and the patterns made a deep impression on me. I loved being there and feeling very Swedish.
I was there for one year and took advantage of the opportunity to travel from a European base. I went to Russia, the Soviet Union at the time, as well as Africa and as many other trips as time and money would allow.
BB: So, at some point you settled into the work world for good.
SP: Yes, my first job back in the states was working for John Carl Warnecke & Associates. But after a short time there, I decided I wanted to work with textile companies, and I got an offer to work with Jens Risom Design (JRD). I didn’t work with Jens himself, as by then he had sold JRD to Dictaphone. Even though I didn’t know anything about business at the time, they gave me the job of Director of Textiles, and I was in charge of the textiles division of JDR.
Then one day I got a call from Ward Bennett, who wanted me to come work with him at Brickell Associates. I didn’t even know who Ward was or the significance of being able to work with him. But I took the job, and working with Ward Bennett and a company like Brickell was just an incredible experience. He taught me many things – how to wear black; I wear black all the time now. But seriously, I think the most important thing he taught me was how to take inspiration from anything and everything. It’s a gift I received from Ward that I use to this day. I love to travel, and I seek inspiration from shapes and colors I see everywhere, and then I use them when I’m designing a collection.
After I’d been at Brickell for about three years, Sam Friedman and Pat Hoffman of ICF called and invited me to come work there and try to make something of a little textile operation they had called Unika Vaev. I said, “OK I can do that.” So I was President and Director of Design at Unika Vaev from 1980 to 1990.
The ‘80s was an exciting time for textile design. We spent a lot of time figuring out how to make beautiful textures and the nuance of different tones and colors and putting them all together in new and exciting ways. It was just the very beginning of using computers to design fabrics, and we were doing all this work by hand. It was also a great time for textiles because at the time there were no mesh chairs and we were putting fabric on everything – even on panels.
At a cocktail party in 1985, I was complaining to Dick Wagner, who was the vice president of textiles at Knoll, that textile companies in the industry weren’t getting the respect we deserved. He agreed, and that’s when we started our own group, the Association for Contract Textiles (ACT). It would be a way for us to promote textiles as a group. And we all loved textiles and had great fun getting together, putting up shows and doing projects. Of course, by now it has become an incredible organization, far beyond what we ever envisioned.
BB: So you left Unika Vaev in 1990 to start your own company.
SP: Yes, that’s right. We had a loft in SoHo where we put down a hardwood floor, and everybody thought it was going to be a gym. I always thought of the company as a studio where we also happened to sell fabrics. It was a great way for me to create fabrics – to make product. We were known for color and textural things with lots of color and stripes. Stripes were easy for me because of the way I design, working closely with geniuses at the mill who could take my ideas and translate them into fabrics.
When I started my own company, I decided to be the person to take all the customer complaint calls. I wanted to understand how to satisfy my customers but also how to make the products better so we wouldn’t have complaints. The biggest complaints involved cleaning and having fabrics destroyed by harsh chemicals. I became really interested in making high performance fabrics that looked good, of course, but also resisted bleach and other harsh chemicals. We worked with Sunbrella Contract to develop one of our first collections of bleach and chemical safe products.
BB: Let’s circle back to that idea of what inspires you when designing a new collection. I know you’ve just completed work on a new collection called Architectural Textures that Momentum is launching right now. Talk a bit about the inspiration for that collection.
SP: I can find inspiration anywhere and everywhere. I’m kind of all over the map. I take pictures all the time, and I have more than 60,000 pictures in my photo library. Travel is really important to me as a source of inspiration. As the name of this collection implies, the main source of inspiration for it is the architecture in cities and places I’ve visited over the last several years. You know I’m a garden girl – I grew up in a garden, but I love big city architecture. I think I first fell in love with architecture while working at SOM. Seeing the effort it takes to get the scale and textures right really spoke to me. This collection is all about the textures and colors we see in architecture – especially the neutrals.
Living in New York, I can always find colors and textures I think would look great in a fabric. But for this new collection the inspiration has come from traveling to cities all over the place. While we were working on it, I got into my library looking at pictures I’ve taken in cities over the years, and you can see patterns, textures and colors from visits to Paris and London as well. In particular, buildings I saw on a business trip to Pittsburgh play a large role in this collection along with views of New York.
BB: Thanks for taking time to share your story with our us. Hearing about your career has been inspiring to me, as I hope it will be to our readers – especially those designers just starting their careers. Talent and hard work still pay off; as do taking risks and believing in yourself.