Cole & Son | Fungi Forest

The toile de Jouy has always been a form for storytelling, a monochrome scene printed on cloth and populated with figures and incident. Stella McCartney's Fungi Forest applies it to a woodland: mushrooms, undergrowth and forest life drawn in a single colour on a plain ground, in the manner of an eighteenth-century French print but with an entirely modern subject.

It came out of her summer 2022 print and was first hung as the backdrop to the Future of Fashion exhibition at Salone del Mobile. The paper itself is unusual in two respects. The substrate is made from 79% renewable fibres and manufactured with 30% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than a conventional non-woven, making it the most sustainable ground Cole & Son has produced. And the roll is 0.93 m wide, close to twice a standard width, which means far fewer seams and a 106.9 cm repeat that can be read whole.

Scale of that kind wants a wall it can occupy. A dining room, a study, a large landing, a bedroom where one wall runs uninterrupted, somewhere the scene can be taken in rather than glimpsed. The match is straight, so the woodland lines up level across the drops and the picture holds together across the room.