Cole & Son | Draped Tartan

Vivienne Westwood built a career on the tartan, and on treating it as cloth rather than as pattern: cut on the bias, ruched, allowed to fall. Draped Tartan begins there. Its source is the taffeta gown from the Anglomania collection of autumn-winter 1993, in which the check was pulled out of true by the cut of the dress so that it ran in several directions at once.

What the Cole & Son studio did with it was slow work. The drapery was painted entirely by hand, stripe by stripe, so the check follows every fold, compressing where the fabric gathers and stretching where it pulls. The result is a trompe l'oeil. From across a room the wall appears to be hung with cloth, and it is only close to that the brushwork gives it away. The match is half drop, which keeps the folds moving diagonally rather than repeating in columns.

This is a design for a room that can take one large gesture and needs nothing else: a stairwell, a dining room, the end wall of a long drawing room. It asks for restraint everywhere around it. Plain floors, quiet upholstery, and lighting that grazes rather than floods, so the painted folds keep their depth and the illusion holds.