Cole & Son | Vivienne Love Andreas

The V Love A print was hand-painted personally by Vivienne Westwood, and it first appeared in the Autumn-Winter 2022/23 Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood collection, shown in the Belle Epoque surroundings of the La Nouvelle Eve revue theatre in Montmartre. She was looking at a book of naive eighteenth-century Italian paintings at the time, countrymen in the mountains, and the drawing keeps that untrained, direct quality throughout.

The Cole & Son studio worked to keep Vivienne's hand as faithful to the original as possible rather than tidy it, and set the artwork into a tile-like repeat. That tile structure is what makes it hang as a wallpaper: it gives an unruly painted image a grid to sit in, so a whole wall has order without the painting being straightened out. Somewhere in the design is the graffiti-like scrawl the paper takes its name from, embedded rather than displayed.

The roll is 0.7 m wide and 8 m long, with a 125 cm repeat and a straight match, so the painted scene establishes itself fully before it begins again. This is a paper for a room prepared to be looked at: a dressing room, a study, a stair, a small dining room. It sits well with worn timber, plain wool and old mirrors, and it is best hung where you will see it often, since it goes on releasing detail for years.