The squiggle is one of the oldest marks in Vivienne Westwood's vocabulary, first seen on the Pirate collection she and Malcolm McLaren showed in 1981. Rainforest Squiggle takes it into a much larger register: an unbroken line that meanders across the wall and never quite closes, so the eye travels the composition in a loop.
The design belongs to the Autumn-Winter 2014/15 Gold Label collection made in support of the Ashaninka of the Peruvian rainforest, and the drawing carries something of that urgency. Cole & Son's artists painted the motif as a single continuous duo-toned brushstroke, which is what stops it reading as graphic wallpaper: the pressure of the hand is visible along the line, thickening and thinning as it turns.
It hangs on a half-drop match, so successive drops offset and the meander never resolves into a grid. Because the pattern has no obvious top or bottom and no fixed focal point, it works across large uninterrupted walls and behaves well in rooms of awkward proportion. Paired with plain upholstery and a hard floor it reads as a mural rather than as a decorative paper. It is one of the few designs in the range that behaves as well in a contemporary flat as in a period room, largely because the line owes nothing to either.
