Lucienne Day (Women Textile Designer)

 Lucienne Day

Introduction

Lucienne Day's influence is the most widespread among postwar Britain's talented female textile designers.

Lucienne Day (Women Designer)

After graduating from the Royal College of Art's Printed Textiles department in 1940, the impacts of WWII limited Lucienne Day's design opportunities, so she supported her design career with teaching positions. She rapidly broadened her ties with current manufacturing partners to generate new furnishing textile patterns as the wartime limitations were lifted. A receptive audience welcomed a breath of fresh air after the visual bleakness of the war years. Along with her husband, furniture designer Robin Day, she advocated for modern living and embraced the image of the newly styled professional designer.

Lucienne Day's delayed career start coincided with a large government drive to enhance the country's industrial output by increasing the stature, training, and output of British designers. Lucienne and Robin were both ideal candidates for the job: ambitious, talented, and dedicated to the life-changing potential that design can provide. Lucienne Day worked for Edinburgh Weavers, Cavendish Textiles (the John Lewis house brand), and Heals at the end of the 1940s.

Day's earliest commercially manufactured furnishing textiles were not excessively avant-garde, vaguely honouring the long-favorite tradition of flowery chintz for home furnishing fabrics, despite the fact that she was already making progressive patterns for the clothing business. Day thought that a designer should be practical and responsive to market demands, and her early works were well-suited to traditional consumer inclinations. Their success led to other commissions and helped her establish herself as a sought-after freelance designer.

The Festival of Britain and 'Calyx'

In 1951, Day had the perfect opportunity to work on something other than a basic commercial job. Her husband Robin had previously been hired to design all of the seating for the Royal Festival Hall, a newly constructed theatre and concert hall on London's South Bank as part of the Festival of Britain, a huge display showcasing Britain's achievements. He also created room settings for the Homes and Gardens Pavilion at the Festival, which featured his own contemporary furniture.

He sought a wallpaper and furnishing fabric that would go well with his modern furniture in these rooms. To demonstrate an economical decor, Provence wallpaper, a prior design by Lucienne Day, was chosen for one room. Lucienne also created Calyx, a new textile design to compliment Robin's more expensive living/dining area. Heals were hesitant to approve the design at first because of its radical character — it was a major leap forward from the type of pattern compositions used on fabrics at the time, but they eventually consented.

Calyx takes its inspiration from a very traditional source, botanical form (the term calyx refers to the outer parts of a flower in botany), but the plant motifs are stylised almost to the point of abstraction, and are linked with diagonal and vertical thin solid and dotted lines, implying flower stalks. The design reflects fresh growth's rising vitality, wonderfully capturing the Festival's spirit and the broader social optimism of the period.

Despite their misgivings, Lucienne Day's new design proved to be a commercial success, and it became one of several in a long-running cooperation between Heals and the designer. It is now regarded as a key work of postwar British design.

Influences and sources of inspiration

Day spent a lot of time at the Victoria and Albert Museum's galleries during her time at the Royal College of Art. In the form of a Chinese sculpture of a horse, she got inspiration for her degree show here. The horse is reduced to a simple pattern in her Horse's Head design, which is alternated with fluidly drawn squares hand-printed onto linen. Script (1956), based on a poem by Maulana Jalal Al Din Runi, was inspired by the Museum's collection once more. The botanical form has been a major source of inspiration for Day throughout her career, and her interpretations of it provide much of the visual delight and innovation in her work.

Small groupings of flower-like structures stand upright against a striped background in Trio (1954). Plant materials are turned into delicate line-drawn forms in Herb Antony (1956), which take on a particular character and hover between reality and imagination. Day benefited from an appreciation of current fine art as well as having something of an artist's sensibility in her extremely considered approach to design. It is often possible to detect the absorbed influence of artists like Juan Miró and Paul Klee, and Day's work may be observed to anticipate or equal fine art influences in many cases. For example, Graphics (1953) is a masterful minimal geometric abstraction, while Causeway (1967) is a remarkable use of colour block contrast.

Despite her and her husband's rising celebrity status, Lucienne Day remained committed to meeting the material necessities and desires of the consumer market. While the big-scale, printed linen Calyx looked great stretched from ceiling to floor in huge spaces, Heals also requested designs that would fit into smaller spaces and be more affordable. She welcomed newly discovered and cheaper man-made fibres, such as rayon, in order to manufacture economical textiles. This was the inspiration behind the films Flotilla (1952) and Lapis (1953).Miscellany, Quadrille, and Palisade were all designed in 1952 for British Celanese, a business that specialized in inexpensive, soft, and durable man-made fabrics manufactured from cellulose fibres. Her designs evolved with the times in the late 1960s, moving to larger geometric based patterns in vibrant colour, demonstrating her ability to adapt and evolve. Day's favorites were Apex (1967) and Sunrise (1969).

Lucienne Day is most known for her furnishing fabric patterns, but she also created designs for a variety of other uses. In the early postwar period, dress materials were an essential component of her creative approach. She collaborated on several successful wallpaper lines with firms like Cole & Son, Crown, and Rasch in Germany. Diabolo was one of three wallpapers that were introduced at the 1951 Festival of Britain. She designed a large number of carpets for Tomkinson's Carpets and Wilton Royal in the 1950s and 1960s, including Tesserae, which won a Design Centre Award in 1957.Too Many Cooks, Bouquet Garni, and Black Leaf (all 1959) were among her most popular designs for a series of tea towels for the Irish linen manufacturer Thomas Somerset, which received a Design Centre Award in 1960. Day also cooperated with the famed German company Rosenthal throughout these fruitful decades of her career, creating stunning patterns for their china dinnerware, such as the Four Seasons line.

Mosaics made of silk

Lucienne Day was an expert at adapting her designs to the needs of a commission, and her work was always evolving. However, the late 1970s saw a return to classic floral designs and 'period' style, which did not appeal to Day, and she began to lose interest in production design. Her commitment to modernity was unwavering, and she had no intention of caving in to the demands of the market. Day began crafting one-of-a-kind silk compositions as a fresh outlet for her creativity. Her 'Silk Mosaics' are made up of 1 cm squares and cultured silk strips, and are made using a traditional patchwork technique. Color blocks and weave textures are skillfully combined to create the design. These works absorbed Day's time in the 1980s and 1990s while she prepared them for exhibits and commissions. Aspects of the Sun (1990), a sculpture made up of five large-scale silk mosaics, was commissioned for a new John Lewis store in Kingston and hung in 1990. In 1985, Decoy and Pond (1983), a whimsical sequence of six silk mosaic works, was added to the V&A collection alongside the more abstract Flying in Blue (1983).