Cole & Son | True-Punk Stripe

Vivienne Westwood has been subverting the stripe since the early years, painting it by hand, overprinting it, letting it wander off the grid it is supposed to obey. The painted stripe runs through her collections from the 1980s, often set behind or beneath another print, and it resurfaced most recently on the oversized shirting of the Autumn-Winter 2025/26 collection. True-Punk Stripe is that stripe translated to a wall.

Cole & Son have kept the overprinting method rather than redrawing the design cleanly, which is the whole reason it works. The hand-painted quality survives, along with the texture of the material the stripe was originally painted on: the loaded start of a brushstroke, the thinning at the end, the drag where the paint met the tooth of the surface. Nothing is ruled, and the edges of the stripe move.

The roll is 0.52 m wide and 8 m long with a 55.6 cm straight repeat, so the stripes align cleanly from drop to drop. A stripe gives a room vertical lift and makes a low ceiling read higher; a hand-painted one does that without the formality of a regency stripe, which is a useful distinction in a modern flat. It works in a hall, a bedroom, a study or a small bar, and sits well with plain wool, worn leather and any amount of black.