Botanical Beauties: The Stories Behind the Curated Floral Fabrics Collection
From fine line drawings to frozen flowers: go behind the scenes of Liberty Fabrics’ autumn winter 2024 collection
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Botanical Beauties: The Stories Behind the Curated Floral Fabrics Collection
From fine line drawings to frozen flowers: go behind the scenes of Liberty Fabrics’ autumn winter 2024 collection
Here at Liberty, we love a floral. As a staple of our iconic print archive since the earliest collections, floral fabrics are as inherently Liberty as our Tudor walls.
Over many years, our print designers have explored innumerable details and nuances of flowers and botanicals and the latest Liberty Fabrics collection, The Curated Floral, takes this even further: situating the flower as an artwork in its own right: mother nature’s perfect creation.
This diverse, contemporary but also reflective collection takes inspiration from the prints of the Liberty archive and makes them anew. Whether its new iterations of classically Liberty flowers such as the lily and the daisy, delicate line drawings with botanical inspiration or entirely new prints created using modern digital techniques.
The Curated Floral is divided into three chapters, each representing a fresh floral exploration:
Floral Focus takes a deep dive into the floral itself. Examining how artists and florists take flowers out of nature to create their works of art. Brimming with texture, this chapter fuses inspiration from still life artworks with microscopic analysis of flowers themselves: a true celebration of organic forms and flourishes
Floral Library brings a sense of order to the collection, viewing the flower through a botanist’s eye to examine how we try to regiment and conform flowers into categories of species and science. Featuring designs rediscovered in the Liberty archive, Floral Library is a celebration of key florals throughout its history.
Floral Wonderland invites you to jump into something otherworldly, falling into the imagination of the artist to discover a floral wonderland. Brimming with landscapes of unique and otherworldly botanicals, this section celebrates a world of never-before-seen species and hybrid varieties.
As the collection flourishes online and within our Tudor walls, we share the stories behind a small selection of designs within the range, from the people who created them.
Babingdon
"Babingdon was reworked from a swatch in our archive dating from 1937. The design was chosen for its resemblance to specific plant and flower species which are either vulnerable or critically endangered in the UK. Flowers such as yellow whitlow-grass, rampion bellflower and St Barnaby’s thistle."
Polly Mason, head of design: seasonal & classics
"The earliest version of this print is from a Liberty fabric sample book, dating from 1937. At the time, the print was given the name 'Clover’."
Florrie Harding, Liberty archive assistant
Frozen in Time
“Frozen in Time was inspired by the work of the Japanese flower artist and botanical sculptor, Makoto Azuma. In particular, his frozen sculptures of flowers. For this design I selected a variety of beautiful flower heads, mainly from my garden but a few from the local florist, and I experimented with freezing them: submerging them in water and taking photos on my iPhone. I then collaged these together to create this ethereal all over repeat.”
Dominique Devaux, senior designer
Fragile Blooms
The Curated Floral is all about taking the flower out of its usual context and looking at it as a piece of art, whether that be its form, patterning, or symbolism.
At Liberty we often take inspiration from flowers and nature, but this collection gave us an opportunity to look beyond that and take the time to focus on the details and the true beauty of the flower.
Fragile Blooms was developed from various still-life studies of poppies, which focused on all the different forms the poppy flower can take during its life cycle. The style was inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, and so I chose to draw the flowers in fine liner pen to give the print a more graphic feel.”
Hannah McCloskey, designer
Mitsi Mix
"Mitsi Mix was created when I produced a series of bold screen prints of one of our most popular Classic designs, Mitsi. Here I experimented with different combinations of colour and layering. We are constantly looking for new and exciting ways to show our Classic designs, and here we see a more modern interpretation of Mitsi, in a much larger scale than before. What is lovely about the design is that it has retained the texture from the paper it was printed on.
To me, The Curated Floral means we have brought together a collection of designs which showcase the flower as a work of art. These flowers have been out of their natural environment and their beauty studied and celebrated to create pieces that would not be out of place of art in a museum."
Dominique Devaux, senior designer
Sunflower Spot
The Curated Floral concept was driven by a desire to really focus on one of Liberty's key design pillars and to explore the Flower as a work of art. To push the boundaries of how we as designers are able to represent the diverse beauty of nature on fabric.
Sunflower Spot was developed from a tiny archival fragment dating from the mid 1800s. Liberty always includes a Paisley aesthetic within a collection and this large scale floral filled with intricate detail is our version for autumn winter 24.
Polly Mason, head of design: seasonal & classics
Sunflower Spot was redrawn from a tiny fabric fragment discovered in the Liberty archive, which was dated between 1830s-1860s. Originally, it came from a paisley book that pre-dates Liberty itself.
Florrie Harding, Liberty archive assistant
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