The jaded among us would say that there are few, if any, design ideas that can be considered truly new each year. One tool for any manufacturer to keep their product line continually fresh is to stay relevant to themes and perspectives currently popular in fashion and contemporary culture, and translate them into commercial interior applications. After all, taking the latest look and making it last in today’s environment is what architecture and design have been about since the very beginning.
When I first heard details about the newest collection from Pallas Textiles that would be on display at NeoCon this year, I was intrigued. Pallas has worked with many talented textile designers in the past; Lori Weitzner, Lucy Aiken-Johnson and Laura Guido-Clark, among others, have collaborated with the company for more than 25 years and created an impressive portfolio of award-winning collections in the process.
One of this year’s collections, Topstitch, is designed by Pattern Pod, a design firm founded in 2013 and consists of designers Geraldine Blanchot and Kristen Dettoni, experts in designing and developing many varieties of textiles for demanding environments. In addition to practicing in the textile industry, Pattern Pod tracks design trends, researches materials and finishes, generates reports and develops marketing materials and strategies for manufacturers, among other things.
What Pattern Pod brings to the A&D table that is new, especially for NeoCon, is a streamlined design/build approach and series of innovative ideas around product customization. Historically, customizing a product has been a huge undertaking, requiring extensive development efforts, high product minimums and large orders that needed to be stored in a warehouse. With the latest advancements in technology and manufacturing, possibilities for a leaner type of manufacturing, offering little to no minimums and quick turnaround times, as well as competitive rates are emerging everywhere. Pattern Pod connects the dots between the design and manufacturing sides of the business.
“Kristen and I have manufacturing backgrounds,” said Ms. Blanchot in the KI showroom at NeoCon. “Our combined experience in textiles is more than 30 years. When we went into this collection, we wanted it to be about our process, and the things that have defined us in the past as artists and as designers.”
At first, topstitching was considered a technique in the industry that was used to tailor, patch and mend fabric.
“Each fabric pattern has stitching elements to it, whether by using connectors or a deflect stitch, which is done through weave structure; little stitches like this can actually result in abrasion problems over time,” said Ms. Dettoni.
To avoid specific performance issues, Pattern Pod chooses their weaving mills accordingly.
“We picked the manufacturer according to what we wanted to accomplish,” says Ms. Blanchot. “We knew that we wanted to do a certain type of stitch, and we had to stay with a nylon yarn, because nylon performs better. Those are just a few of the decisions that went into the process. These are the things that motivate us, not just what the fabric looks like in the end.”
With the Topstitch Collection, traditionally decorative and elaborate design elements are juxtaposed with simple design motifs like squares, lines and circles, which are the basic building blocks of composition.
“During our past lives working at fabric mills, a lot of times people would hand us a print or a color chip and want us to reproduce it on a textile,” said Ms. Dettoni. “It does not work that way. Every color equals a weave; that weave usually does something specific, and depending on the weave and how the loom passes the color, it really does something entirely different than the graphic on the paper.”
Textile construction techniques aside, let’s not forget these products also have to be made sustainably and perform as expected.
“We need to meet government standards and industry parameters that are being set in place by manufacturing associations and MBDC, the Cradle to Cradle certified people, USGBC, the list goes on,” said Ms. Blanchot. “At the end of the day, we need to come up with something that is essentially a solution to everybody’s problem and also make sure it looks beautiful and comes in at the right price point. There is a lot of math involved in what we do.”
There is also a visual acknowledgement of the history of weaving embedded in this collection as well.
“We based Topstitch on the duality of form and function,” said Ms. Blanchot. “Topstitching, which was called Kantha In India, or Sashiko in Japan, is their process for mending clothing; that is how it was originally initiated. Over time, it became decorative. Kantha, for example, was not intended to be decorative at first. It was literally something that needed to happen so that people could recycle old pieces of fabric and clothing.
“We wanted to interpret this practical idea of form and function into a performance textile application. Not only are we trying to get the best performance out of our textiles, we also want to convey a sense of tactility and tangibility in a way that is more possible with fabric, and really, more of what people may expect from a woven or a knit fabric.”
Iteration, the process of revisiting the same design and process with minor changes, is integral to their creative approach.
“We are iterating because we are looking at the structures and studying each separate element,” said Ms. Blanchot. “If you look closely at this fabric, you will see that every single stage is exactly the same number of vertical warp ends. The spacing is also exactly the same, and that divides into the warp ends as well. All of that was done on purpose.”
At Pattern Pod, carefully choosing the many different ways a fabric can be built is what makes them strong designers.
“We can send a weave structure to the manufacturing plant we are working with,” said Ms. Blanchot, “and tell them what look we are after for this particular design. We may want a double weave or a tissue weave, which is where float threads in the back add color to the textile face. Things like that build price into a piece of fabric.”
“It is hard to translate what I see in my head into an image in someone else’s head,” said Ms. Dettoni. “Working with Pallas was such a collaborative process. When they presented the design brief, they gave us plenty of freedom to come up with some great concepts and pitch them back to Dean Lindsley, VP of product development for Pallas.“
Design briefs from Pallas are very similar to design briefs from other manufacturers.
“We generally get a brief with basic parameters on the number of SKUs they are putting in their line, performance attributes they want to reach, number of patterns, and the approximate scale,” said Ms. Blanchot.
But for the last four to five years, Mr. Lindsley noted that most Pallas design briefs have been cross-market.
“We feel there is a significant convergence going on within each market, said Mr. Lindsley. “Some people want to get a great residential feel, more comfortable and like home; others are more concerned with performance. “When we developed the brief for these fabric patterns, we focused on business, educational and healthcare markets. Then we developed the parameters around the design and performance elements of the collection.”
For this particular collection, there is a lot going on in some patterns than can be discerned at first glance.
“All of these patterns were hand drawn at the onset,” said Ms. Blanchot, “and then brought into our computer for further development. We only used one print color on the polyurethane to keep manufacturing costs down. We did, however, use three separate opacities of the same color. If only the opacity is changed, you get the appearance of different colors. We have built huge swatch libraries digitally. These are all fabrics that we have scanned into that environment and then applied the weave structures to our designs.
“If you look at the Deflect pattern close up, not only does it have three separate opacity levels, it also has a small level of speckle within each dot, which is from the fabric scan we used from our swatch library.”
“We made sure that when we constructed these,” said Ms. Dettoni, “we considered the color palettes of course, but we also looked at the actual structure of the fabric in order to get the most saturated color out of its construction. In designing this line, we took a holistic view of the entire Pallas textiles line, and you can already see how these coordinate with a few existing products.”
Indeed, the KI/Pallas showroom at NeoCon was decorated with several furniture pieces upholstered with the new textiles. I had mentioned to Mr. Lindsley how critical it is for manufacturers to show how their new textiles look on upholstered pieces and how the patterns handle complex curves. “We have a tool on our website,” he said, “called See it Spec it. Once we go to market, we will preselect certain pieces of furniture – a lounge piece, a conference chair, for example, or a large bench-type seating element. These pieces are then all rendered to thread-level detail, and users can see it and download the image to share with their client.”
Textile design and construction calls for much more than a few pretty ideas. The collaborations that Pallas Textiles has pursued as of late and the resulting collections impress and inspire aesthetic innovation through a thorough understanding of manufacturing techniques.