When Kvadrat invited a group of 22 designers to create one-off objects out of its iconic Divina fabric – for a special exhibition entitled Divina, Every Colour Is Divine – the brief was simple.
“The brief was: you can take as much textile as you want and create something interesting with it,” explains Njusja de Gier, Kvadrat’s vice president of branding and communication, when we meet in the Kvadrat Maharam showroom in Dubai’s Jumeirah Lakes Towers.
“We don’t have any commercial reasoning behind the project, except that we wanted to do something interesting and inspire people. We are not going to produce any of the pieces because we are a textiles manufacturer, not a furniture company, so it didn’t need to be a product that could be industrialised. I think that was quite interesting for designers.”
Then the orders started coming in. For his creation, Lasagne, the designer Philippe Nigro requested about 300 square metres of fabric; Muller Van Severen required about the same amount for his proposed Day Bed. De Gier was ever-so-slightly concerned – for a similar exhibition the company had organised previously, the designers had used a maximum of 60 square metres each. “Just go with it,” her boss said.
Then came Richard Hutten’s order: 800 square metres. The Dutch designer had decided that he would create a chair made exclusively out of Divina.
“The exhibition was all about Divina, which is an upholstery material that is traditionally only used as a cover. So I thought it would be nice to make an object entirely out of Divina – with no foam and no other materials. That’s was my starting point,” Hutten tells me.
“We started to play with the material; we cut it, we burnt it, we stretched it; we did all kinds of things to find out about its different qualities. In the process, we discovered that you can cut the material and it doesn’t need a seam to end it; it doesn’t fray and stays perfectly in shape when you cut it. So we wanted to work with that. We also wanted to work with all the fantastic colours.”
Hutten’s resultant Layers Cloud Chair weighs a whopping 250 kilograms; it consists of 545 layers of Divina, in about 100 different colours – the result of a total of 600 man hours. As the name suggests, the chair is shaped like a cloud (“a cloud is a good shape to sit on and dream on,” says Hutten), although this presented its own set of issues. “We ended up making a drawing, by hand, for each layer. We then cut each layer and then hand-applied the material, layer by layer, to build the chair,” he says.
Divina was first created in 1984 by the Danish painter and graphic artist Finn Sködt, and he has regularly updated the collection since. A full-cloth textile with a smooth surface that feels like felt, the fabric is best known for the fact that it comes in more than 100 different colourways.
One-and-a-half years in the making, the Divina, Every Colour Is Divine exhibition was launched to coincide with Sködt's 70th birthday, and was an opportunity to highlight the groundbreaking nature of this famed fabric. Up-and-coming and established designers around the world were invited to work their magic with it.
“Divina was the first of its kind,” says de Gier. “Of course, there have been a lot of copies on the market, but what makes it so special is that because of its construction, it takes the colour extremely well. It is super-hard-wearing and has a very extensive colour scale. It’s wool, but soft to the touch. So there are a lot of characteristics that make it very special.”
While the exhibition was first presented at the 2014 edition of Milan’s Salone del Mobile, select pieces have since been touring the world and made a stop in Dubai in mid-May. Hutten’s Layers Cloud Chair was one of the pieces to make an appearance in JLT; others were Max Lamb’s beautifully stark Smock, inspired by the traditional workwear adorned by fishermen through the ages; Van Severen’s Day Bed, which plays with three contrasting colours to create a slimline lounger; Jib by Peter Marigold, a collection of colourful stools made from interchangeable parts that can be assembled and reassembled to create countless combinations; and Garlands by Studio Minale-Maeda, four oversized, playfully shaped strings of fabric that drop from the ceiling. When grouped together, the pieces offer a fascinating reminder of how creative minds can take the same raw materials and end up with very different results.
At its heart, the travelling exhibition is also meant to serve as a reminder of the innovative and design-forward nature of this Danish brand, which was launched in 1968 and is known for pushing the aesthetic, technological and artistic boundaries of textiles. Kvadrat has collaborated with some of the world’s biggest design talents, from Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec and Tord Boontje to David Adjaye and Patricia Urquiola. The brand has also joined forces with Raf Simons, the creative director of Dior Women. The first Kvadrat/Simons collection was launched in March 2014, and like subsequent lines, was defined by highly textured, highly tactile features and innovative colour blends.
In the UAE, where the brand has yet to properly cement its position as a design leader, its Divina exhibition was a colourful PR exercise that was long overdue. Kvadrat is one of Europe’s leading textile houses, and has created high-quality contemporary textiles and textile-related products for private and public spaces ranging from the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles to the Reichstag in Berlin, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Guangzhou Opera House in China. But in the UAE, there are still some obstacles to overcome, says De Gier.
“This is an emerging market for us. We have been here for a few years and it is definitely growing. The challenge for Dubai is here we are two companies [under the same roof], Kvadrat and Maharam, and Kvadrat is very much the wool company. And I don’t really think people here are used to wool; they see it as something you use to keep warm, but they don’t know all the other positive characteristics of wool, so there’s a lot of education going on.
“Wool is a really nice product because it is a natural product and a sustainable one; it is also very hard-wearing and it ages very nicely,” she says. “It might be a little different for people here, who are used to leather, but actually, if you look at our products, they are very high-end. Quality is very important here, and our products can really contribute to that whole aesthetic. By bringing textiles into an environment, it creates more warmth; it makes it friendlier and more homely.”
Hutten also highlights the acoustic and fireproof qualities of wool-based textiles, not to mention the fact that they’re self-cleaning. “Textiles are very unique as a material. You wear them on your body; you don’t wear any other material that close. Then you decorate your home with them, from furniture to curtains to the roof. It is so diverse. No other material has that, which makes it very special.”
sdenman@thenational.ae
