Announcing Les Fleurs du Mal, our Loops Chair collaboration with MARK Product for Clerkenwell Design Week, featuring our very own handmade fabric. Here, we explore the design story and inspiration behind our piece.
In the PENSON studio, we take things, shake them up and find something totally unique. So, when we got the opportunity to reinterpret the Loops chair, we stripped it back to its foundations to find the basis of our inspiration. In doing so, we discovered that the elements of the chair itself were pivotal in forming our design.
The chair in its original form is the beginning of its story, with the ending taking shape in the designer’s hands. It’s a journey of elements.
We knew we wanted to incorporate flowers into our design so that got us thinking about how other designers have used nature. Alexander McQueen and his Savage Beauty exhibition was influential to our thinking and gave us the inspiration to take the flowers from being naturally beautiful to having a deeper meaning; something darker and more decadent.
Another element to our design is the poem Les fleurs du mal by the French poet Baudelaire which loosely translates into English as ‘The Flowers of Evil’. The poem is about beginnings and endings, and everything in between.
Our design represents the idea of something beautiful and eternal; the flowers are dried, so they are an allegory of life and afterlife. You could say they’ve become an icon.
In the poem Les fleurs du mal, there is an overwhelming of the senses. Our Loops Chair combines a contrast between the raw materials and the softness of the foam along with the warming scent of the lavender. The intricate sewing of the flowers within the fabric represents the threading of our ideas through the piece. We took this project as an opportunity to reflect PENSON’s creativity and to shake up the competition.
Come, see and vote for our Loops chair at the MARK Product showroom this week. Winners are announced at the MARK Product closing party on Thursday. We’ll see you there!
