SAVANNAH The Liberty Archive

Adam Herbert, Lead Bespoke Designer at Liberty Fabrics has brought together the African flair for pattern and Liberty design heritage to create his first edited fabric collection, Pattern Savannah. Researching Africa’s visual culture, he became fascinated with the geometric patterns that kept cropping up, from basket weaving to decorative paintings, ‘I felt the idea of developing a bold geometric collection was really exciting, so I went to Anna to discover what geometrics were in the archive’. To comb through Liberty’s archive is a textile designer’s dream. Overseen by in-house archivist Anna Buruma, her knowledge of the company’s design history and archival holdings proved invaluable to the development of the new collection. Working alongside Buruma, what Herbert discovered in the archives, was that Liberty’s design production has encompassed an extraordinary breadth of styles over its 144 year history, ‘when Anna started showing me all the different genres I was really blown away by the diversity’. The pair worked closely to explore the archive, which Buruma describes as amazingly wide. Together, they selected historic geometric designs, imbued with a sense of modernity. As Herbert describes, ‘One of the designs - a floral that reminded me of wax cloth fabrics - dates back to the early 1900s but still looks so modern’. It was while the pair were working their way through the archive, that

Buruma introduced Herbert to the work of 1960s designer Bernard Nevill. ‘Anna and I were talking about the history of capsule collections and how the Liberty design studio has historically always done them as extra edits to its core seasonal collections. Anna showed me the work of Bernard Nevill and it was totally inspiring.’ Nevill designed collections inspired by subjects as diverse as Jazz music, Islamic tiles and Matisse. These fabric collections were exclusive designs offered to couture clients, in addition to the more well-known design styles.

Herbert and Buruma are in good company with their admiration for Nevill’s work. In Liberty’s London design studio hangs one of their favourite Nevill artworks, Macedonia. The archive notes showed it was used by Yves Saint Laurent in the groundbreaking collection when he introduced the midi skirt. As Herbert explains, ‘We loved the idea of bringing something back out of the archive that had been so iconic’. Though Herbert has made one vital change, reducing the pattern size so that more of the repeat can be seen across the fabric. Though as he notes, ‘When YSL used it, it was engineered to be placed and printed to fit exactly for a particular garment.’ According to Buruma, Nevill liked to create his designs so that the customer could only use the fabric in one particular way, ‘There’s not many textile designers who do that now’, she observes. www.libertylondon.com