Couch Couture

Fashion Comes Home

By CHRIS SCHMIDT

It's a marriage of fashion and home furnishing that has everything to do with wallpaper, but for once, nothing to do with *Wallpaper -- the model-filled design magazine that, in the late '90s, made sex and Saarinen synonymous.

In fact, the current crop of fashion-cum-interior designers are eschewing the less-is-more aesthetic altogether. Instead, style makers such as Tom Ford of Gucci and Stephen Sprouse seem to be taking inspiration from the 1890s, when designer-artists such as William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh did it all -- designed buildings, crafted furniture, wrote poetry -- and created distinctive custom wallpaper.

Minimalism is out; patterns are in. (If New York nightclub design is anything to judge by, the trend is catching. The 13th Street club Spa recently remodeled and rechristened itself as Plaid, with a new design featuring a very English manor hodgepodge of clashing upholstery and wallpaper patterns out of a V.S. Pritchett story.)

Designer Tom Ford, whose Gucci stores were once a touchstone for a certain lapidary spareness (the designer is so averse to color that he painted the parquet wood floors of his Parisian apartment black) is just this week making available the first item in a new, expanded Gucci home collection whose very existence all but announces a break from the minimalist aesthetic: wallpaper.

The decorative wall covering comes in two different patterns -- one brown, one silver -- that maximize the Gucci "G" logo. The wallpaper is sold in packs of four rolls at the Gucci store on Fifth Avenue for $285.The other items in the opulent home collection -- including a pressed leather cigarette box, $175, and a Nordic wolf blanket, $13,000 -- will appear over the course of the summer.

Mr. Ford isn't the only designer getting in on the home textile market. Stephen Sprouse, whose 1980s fluorescent fashions would make any Studio 54 time capsule complete, is lending his guerrilla sensibility to KnollTextiles, an offshoot of the Soho-based furniture store that curates and manufactures all things mid-century.

Mr. Sprouse, whose own career was resurrected a few years ago when Marc Jacobs asked him to design graffiti-covered luggage for Louis Vuitton, created five distinct textile patterns for Knoll in a number of palettes ranging from the earthy to the fluorescent. Two are velvets that function as both drapery and upholstery fabric, two are only for drapery, and one is only for upholstery.The textiles will be available by the yard in the fall at Knoll's SoHo showroom.

Some of Mr. Sprouse's designs fit in with the subtle but witty Knoll aesthetic -- particularly, his "Static Screen" textile. "I get really good static on Channel 2," Mr. Sprouse said in a phone interview this week, describing his inspiration for the design.

Other textiles are more recognizably Sprousian, such as a Day-Glo camouflage print covered with text from the Declaration of Independence, rendered in Mr. Sprouse's signature graffiti-like scrawl. Is the textile a political statement? "It seemed pretty timely when I started doing it last fall," Mr. Sprouse said.

But beyond the political implications, Mr. Sprouse said, "I like the 'inalienable rights' thing. It's just a great word, inalienable -- pretty sci-fi for the Declaration of Independence."

Mr. Sprouse and Mr. Ford are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to fashion designers getting in on the home design business. Hedi Slimane, the razor-thin wuenderkind of Dior Homme, is producing a furniture line for Cappellini (no images are available yet, but knowing the unforgiving cut of Dior Homme's clothes and Mr. Slimane's own physique, the emphasis will undoubtedly be on the frame, not the cushioning) to debut by the end of the year.

Also partnering with Cappellini on home lines are whimsical London designer Paul Smith and the Italian design house Pucci, famous for its colorful prints.

Why the colonization of the design market by fashion designers? "I think it's the last area for these design stars to assert themselves," said Michael Maharam, co-partner of Maharam textiles, in a phone interview. In a reversal of the fashion to home-design trend, Mr. Maharam has teamed up with handbag maker Jack Spade to produce a line of tote bags employing textiles by modern-design luminary Alexander Girard.

It's a skin swap: While Mr. Sprouse is dressing up mid-century classics in new clothes, Girard's original upholstery textiles will be crossing over into the world of fashion. The Jack Spade/Maharam bags -- beach totes, pouches, and an over-theshoulder bag in three different textiles that retail from $55 to $395 -- will be sold in October at Kate Spade and Jack Spade stores, and at Vitra design stores; they will also be available as early as August at Neiman Marcus, Barneys, and other department stores.

Mr. Maharam, who is also collaborating with Paul Smith on a line of upholstery fabrics (Maharam textiles are sold at the SoHo design store Moss), noted the aptness of the circularity. "It used to be that designers, like the Eameses, worked in multiple disciplines; then they weren't for a while; and now they are again," he said.

But there is one vital difference. "These days,the trend now is marketing-based -- it's a financial opportunity. But often these people are talented, and they do well to work outside their previous boundaries," he said.