A veritable rainbow of fabrics from Manuel Canovas
Manuel Canovas designers must have children who drink lots of different kinds of fruit punch and wear bright playclothes year round because the color palette that French fabrics house introduces each spring is full of rich, saturated pinks, yellows, reds and purples.
Indian, Chinese, Japanese and Mayan patterns are at the heart of Canovas's cotton and linen prints and woven taffetas, silks, damasks and sheers, such as Dari (picture above, middle row, second from right), a silk inspired by the changing colors of the sky, and Suzani (bottom row, second from left), inspired by a 19th-century Middle Eastern embroidery.
With pink being a recurring fashion trend, designers at several fabrics houses came up with shocking to shy tones. At Canovas, Doria's oversized carnations coordinate with Zaran (both, bottom left), a sheer of overlaid silks interpersed with gold and silver threads that is best used for curtains.
J. Robert Scott's silk rib, St. Tropez stripe, taffeta, Canon check, in peony pink
Sally Sirkin Lewis of J. Robert Scott based one of her collections entirely on the peony, the flower of the noble classes in ancient China. J. Robert Scott’s collection of 149 colors and 40 neutrals now includes peony pink, which comes in a bold check, a taffeta, silk rib and the St. Tropez stripe (above), all made of pure Thai silks. “It makes a great ‘neutral’ to so many other colors,” says Lewis. “I love using pink with grays, browns, ebony, yellow, hunter green, navy—it truly is versatile.”
Doria and Zaran from Manuel Canovas
Canovas's Maya, Fantasia and Mazare
Now, Canovas’s colorful minds restrained themselves with some of the fabrics to offer more muted tones (above right), such as Mazare (bench upholstery), a vertical stripe in viscose and cotton that alternates velvet with a strie plain weave, Fantasia (background), a silk-and-linen damask that comes in seven two-tone colorways, and Maya (top pillow), a horizontal ribbed cotton chenille.
March 2003
