10/03/2026
Opening tomorrow: MANIERA at Collectible. Anouck Morlon. Ravioli One-Seater / Blanket. March 11 — 15.
Although Morlon cites precedents from illustrious design history — most notably Eileen Gray’s elegant Fauteuil Transatlantique (1926), inspired by the deckchairs of luxury transatlantic ocean liners popular in the 1920s, designed for the terrace of her villa on the French Riviera, and later produced in leather, hair hide, and various fabrics — her own approach to upholstery is distinctly sartorial. Approaching the brief as a kind of “dressing up” of the wooden transat, her research drew on The Art of Manipulating Fabric by Colette Wolff, a comprehensive manual of gathering, pleating, shirring, smocking and tucking techniques that she first encountered during her internship with Beirut-based womenswear designer Rym Beydoun of SuperYaya. It was within these pages that she discovered the sculptural potential of matelassé. Putting this technique into practice while at ÉCAL, she transformed a papery, starched, two-dimensional fabric sourced from an oldschool fabric store in Montmartre, Paris, into a threedimensional landscape of cushiony mounds of fabric elevated from small, squared foundations (1). Arranging these modular matelassé panels into a tightly controlled middle section, she allowed the fabric along its edges to spill sumptuously in expressive folds that, she notes, move “a bit like a skirt.” The result was a study in how fabric, when manipulated by hand, could behave both architecturally and expressively.
Read the full text by Amelia Stevens via the link in bio. Photography by Vittorio Franzolini. by Thanks to &
