Sixteen figures make up Couture Carousel, each drawn and painted by hand at Cole & Son's Chelsea showroom, and each standing for a moment in the history of couture: the constructed glamour of the fifties and sixties at one end, the experiment and provocation of the eighties and nineties at the other. Read across a wall, the design is a short history of the twentieth century told through what people wore.
The drawing has the looseness of fashion illustration rather than the precision of a technical repeat, which is the right register. The figures have attitude, the line is quick, and the proportions are exaggerated exactly as a fashion plate exaggerates them. Because there are sixteen of them, the pattern takes a long time to repeat visually even where it repeats mechanically.
It is offered on either a matte ground or a mica one, and the two behave quite differently: matte reads as illustration, mica as something closer to satin. The roll is 0.7 m wide with a metre repeat on a non-woven base. Use it in a dressing room, a hall, a stair or a bedroom, and let the furniture stay plain so the figures carry the room. It is a design people read rather than simply look at.
