Collage Floral: From Garden Sketch to Bold New Block Print

Gardening, Art and Printing—Our new custom block print, Collage Floral, in Style 71C-02 Divya Top and 71H-13 Zarine Dress brings it all together. Here's how we got there—

We looked high and low in the archives for a new floral block print. We wanted a bold, fun floral with a fresh contemporary edge for how we live now. We knew we needed a print that was both easy to wear, and strong enough to stand up to 2025. More than ever, we all want our clothes to be versatile. Pieces need to do double and triple duty, and we seek pieces that we can wear in many different ways. The energy of the familiar « cottage » florals from the COVID years don't feel quite right anymore. We wanted a floral with a more graphic quality, a mix of geometric and floral elements. When we didn't find the right print in the old block archives, we made our own! I turned to my old sketchbooks...

Like many of you, I find inspiration in nature. If you are like me, every spring you look forward to seeing garden flowers come back to life. My favorite perennial flowers bloom in the same predictable sequence year after year. It's like waiting for old friends to visit. First, the daffodils appear, then alum, lilac and so on, until sometime in late spring the poppies appear. I am especially fond of the poppies because they are so fleeting. I like to sketch them, and I have a sketchbook full of poppy petals and leaves drawn from many angles.

The poppy sketches provided the perfect starting point for further print exploration, but they needed to be simplified. Next, I made a collage using cut paper, cardboard and gouache (a flat, opaque water color paint). I redrew the elements, distilling the original sketch into 4 or 5 clear shapes. Using a fine blade, I carefully cut around each individual element, being careful not to break the outer edges of the page. The shapes lifted out of the paper leaving behind the perfectly intact negative space, which would become another design element in the collage. I painted each shape with a single color, and arranged the floral shapes so they overlapped and touched the page from which they were cut. The collage had both both geometric and floral elements. I made multiple copies of the collage and put it into repeat. This was starting to feel like a block print!!!

The repeat was sent to a block printer and a block carver in Bagru, a village near Jaipur, India, known for it's block printing. Many families who live here are involved in the textile block printing industry and there are a few block carvers in the village itself. The block carver translated the collage into 4 different blocks, which would be used to print the ground color and all the elements in the design. The printer gave the blocks a test run, using them to print in their dabu resist style. You can probably imagine how exciting it is to see that first print run appear on the fabric! From there we adopted the floral into the collection.

We hope you enjoy knowing more about our Collage Floral! Wear the Divya top in the afternoon with sneakers and jeans to run to the farmer's market. With a quick change to black pants and a dressier shoe, the same Divya takes you right to out to dinner. And, our Zarine dress is a great choice anytime! It's so easy to dress up and down.

—Adele Mattern | Creative Director