Vivienne Westwood used animal print for forty years and never once used it straight. It was blown up out of scale in the Civilizade collection of spring-summer 1989 and printed in bright red for Always On Camera three years later, always with the point being that the print was doing something fur never does in nature.
This version was redrawn entirely by hand in the Cole & Son studio, and the drawing is deliberately loose. The rosettes vary in size and pressure, some open and some closed, and the spacing wanders, so the surface reads as mark-making before it reads as leopard. It is screen printed, which keeps the artist's hand in the edge of every mark. The colourways compound the effect, pairing tones no animal carries, so the design hovers between abstraction and representation. At 91.4 cm on a wide 0.69 m roll with a half-drop match, the marks scatter without forming ranks.
Treated as a texture rather than as an animal print, it becomes surprisingly usable. It papers a dressing room, a cloakroom, a study or a bedroom without any of the theatre the motif usually brings, and it sits well with plain heavy fabrics, dark timber and a single good light.
