Jonathan Saunders’s new venture, a graphic but spare line of wood, metal and resin furniture, isn’t so much a departure for the Scottish fashion designer as a return. After graduating from the master’s program at London’s Central Saint Martins school in 2003, he designed prints for Alexander McQueen, including the celebrated, psychedelic bird-of-paradise motif from the spring 2003 collection. From there, he consulted for Christian Lacroix at Pucci and simultaneously launched his own namesake line — tailored, vibrantly hued men’s and women’s wear — which he shuttered in 2015. The following year, he took a position as chief creative officer at Diane von Furstenberg, where he brought his knack for unusual color and print combinations (burnt orange and turquoise florals, for example, paired with azure and caramel check).
But the Glasgow native’s first love was always home furnishings. He recalls painting terra-cotta pots and other objects in off-kilter pastel shades. At 16, he left school to take a carpentry course at a local workshop before winning a scholarship to attend the Glasgow School of Art, where he specialized in textile design. It was that school’s famous medieval- and Japanese-inspired sandstone building — conceived by the Scottish proto-Modernist architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the late 1890s — that solidified his fascination with unexpected juxtapositions of materials and pattern. “I was walking up the stairwell going in for my interview and saw that Mackintosh had used an inlay of concrete in a really graphic square format,” he recalls. “I just remember thinking how incredibly modern that felt.”
Providing a contrast to the angular shapes of the furniture collection — which also includes a lacquered black-and-red sycamore-and-birch bench and a cube-shaped stool with a tomato-red and toffee-colored steel-tube base — Saunders has also developed his own textiles. He uses an open-screen-printing method, which allows the wet inks (black, oatmeal, sulfuric yellow) to bleed into each other, and maintains the mark of his own hand. “I was trying to do something that would loosen me up a little,” he says.
Making things outside fashion’s relentless schedule has proved liberating as well to the 42-year-old; the slower pace has given Saunders time to think about not only what he creates but how and why he does it. He references the Bauhaus, the early 20th-century avant-garde German school-cum-craft guild, as a model for thoughtful, multidisciplinary production. His fabrics will not only be used in multiple ways in his furniture — he is developing a transparent Perspex coffee table with scraps of the patterned cloth suspended within it, for example — but are also available for other designers to purchase. He may even release the occasional jacket or dress in future collections, if the right idea presents itself. “What I’m trying to do,” he says, “is to make the things I love and enjoy the process.”
Saunders’s furniture will be on display in the MatchesFashion lounge at the Frieze Los Angeles art fair from Feb. 13 to 16, 2020.
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