Luxury designer fashion brands are masters of their own fabric creation so it makes sense that increasing numbers are expanding into homewares to meet demand.
One of the latest to join the fashionable fray is Sabatini with the launch of Sabatini Home.
Its offering – elegant and chic homewares (cushion, throws, ottomans) in rich colour palettes of claret and Prussian blues. Hints of leather are also reflected in the range to merge key colour palettes and textures for 2015 interiors.
Each piece in the collection is lovingly designed and made in New Zealand, and available from selected leading homeware boutiques in Australia and New Zealand.
“With our in-house production and more than half a century in the knitwear trade, developing a luxury knitwear homeware range was a no-brainer,” says Sabatini managing director Tony Milich.
Meanwhile Australian fashion label Gorman, which has dabbled in homewares for a while now, has recently collaborated with Melbourne-based glass artist Amanda Dziedzic on a summer line of glasswares to complement Gorman’s seaside-inspired summer collection.
Dziedzic takes inspiration from Japanese aesethetics and nature, particularly the pattern and colours found in plants.
Sustainable designer Miranda Brown also looks to nature for inspiration for her fashion and homeware lines, and says everything she creates is about replicating the patterns and beauty of nature.
“Instead of being a radical activist chaining myself to a boat I can communicate the importance of conservation through my work,” says Brown. “When you look through a microscope at patterns in nature, there is complex mathematics and design that is very evident and that’s been my inspiration for my art prints. I believe if we are intimate with the ecosystem, it’s only natural that we come to a better understanding of it and consequently want to become better guardians of our precious ecosystem.”
The Miranda Brown Conscious Cloth range of homewares has recently expanded, and is now being applied across art prints, commissions for interior and exterior buildings, wallpaper, light fittings and soft furnishings.
Her latest collection, Birds of the Forest, includes Conscious Cloth lifestyle fashion, soft furnishings, cushions, T-towels, artprints and wooden laser-cut birds. She has chosen extinct, rare and endangered birds (laughing owl, huia and falcon) “so that we remember and play our actions forward”.
Brown has combined fashion and interiors from the label’s inception, starting with lights and cushions. However, the homeware part of the business is now taking centre stage with the fashion collection “pared back to a functional range” so that she can focus on public art installations and private client work “in the built environment”.
“I’m not driven by trends as what I observe is people wanting to know what’s in the supply chain, is it locally made, or does it have a social and environmental purpose?” Brown says. “I see a huge step change backed up by research in people’s awareness and I see real growth in demand for brands delivering on this ethos.”