SImon loves Liberty!

Simon loves liberty!

Menswear shirting for Simon Carter, India

Liberty — an iconic store with a distinctive mock-Tudor frontage in London’s West End — is known for its luxury goods, covering everything from fashion to cosmetics to interior design; and is particularly recognized for its graphic and floral prints. However, Liberty is not just another department store. It played a major role in the development of artistic styles such as the arts and craft movement, and has a long-standing connection with art and design.

The founder of Liberty, Arthur Lasenby Liberty, was born in 1843 to a draper. Beginning work at 16, he was apprenticed to a draper shortly afterwards. However, Liberty instead decided to take a job at Farmer and Rogers, a women’s fashions specialist in Regent Street, rising quickly up the ranks. Inspired by more than 10 years of service, Liberty decided to open his own store. He borrowed £2,000 from his soon-to-be father-in-law and took a lease on one half of a shop on Regent Street, opening Liberty & Co in 1875 with only three members of staff.

Liberty didn’t want to run just another store — he harbored a dream of an Eastern Bazaar in London that could fundamentally change homeware and fashion. Naming the store ‘East India House’, his collection of ornaments, fabrics and objects d’art from the Far East captured the attention of London, already in the crux of orientalist fervor. It only took 18 months for Liberty to repay his loan, purchase the second half of the store, and begin to add neighboring properties to his portfolio. From the beginning, the store also imported antiques, with the original V&A museum actually purchasing pieces of Eastern embroidery and rugs for its collection.

Throughout the history of the store, liberty London has had many tie-ups with renowned brands and artists through the years. It has created a truly unique impact towards the world of print and forms the inspiration for the first range developed for Simon Carter. Simon Carter has been associated with liberty and large part of his range uses fabrics from Liberty. For my first range the requirement was to keep the look of the prints similar to liberty but create new floral options that would appear similar in style to Liberty London. Keeping this requirement in mind I developed a range of prints that were inspired by famous gardens in England.

For this range the references were made from going through various images of heritage gardens in England and the various plants and flowers that were found within these gardens.

As liberty London creates a very fine motif this was the important factor to be followed throughout the range. For this collection a total of 8 artworks were created and were to be used over 2 different shirt styles. It was important to keep in mind that Liberty London creates its fabrics using rotary printing, which was not possible for Simon Carter in India as we would not be able to meet the minimum order quantity needed.

As for the color story to be followed, many of the color references came from the mood and inspiration images and no set color direction was finalised for any of the ranges developed. The Design requirement from the range was to recreate classic liberty fabrics with similar look and feel and illustrative styles.

Initial Sketches

Based on the initial reference images and studying upon various liberty prints from their catalogue and books these were some of the initial sketches developed for working on the final print range.