For their eighth year working together, Danish textile brand Kvadrat and Raf Simons, the prolific Belgian fashion designer and cocreative director of Prada, have completely shaken up the nature of their collaboration. Rather than launching a new collection of upholstery fabrics like they normally do each spring—previous years have produced turmeric-colored mohair piles, rose pink corduroys, and speckled wood bouclé—Simons has put his own aesthetic spin on a classic American design.
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“I was interested in designing a system,” he explains, sitting in a cherry red Jean Royère Polar Bear armchair in the cavernous front room of his Liberty-style villa in Milan, with his six-year-old black-and-gray-spotted Beauceron, Luca, stretched out at his feet. “Something that could sit in between architecture and a forgotten object—the kind of things that are always around but we never really think of.”
The undertaking has fully developed in the form of the Shaker System, an innovative home storage system Simons designed from scratch. It was inspired by the prosaic wall-mounted railings found in traditional Shaker homes, long wood boards adorned with a single row of pegs, upon which everything—from chairs to jackets to brooms—would hang in order to keep common spaces clean and orderly.
“I’ve always been obsessed with Shaker furniture,” he says of the inspiration, which he researched in depth during his stint in New York City as the chief creative officer of Calvin Klein. “As much as it’s seen as purist and poor. For me, it’s very alien-like. I find it very futuristic.” Simons’s version updates the classic form: Instead of a simple peg rail, his version features a long, upholstered railing with hooks hidden within and uses Kvadrat’s Vidar 4 fabric in pink, dark green, black, or white. “It looks minimal and simple,” he says, “but it is, of course, a technical thing.”
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Despite their long relationship, this is the first time Simons has devised an entirely new type of product for Kvadrat. However, the idea of branching out, he admits, had been swirling around for several years. “I didn’t want to do something simple like a tote bag,” he recalls of early brainstorms. “I didn’t want to design a product that made no sense for me, and I didn’t feel like doing a piece of furniture. I only wanted to do something a step further and think about how people live their domestic environment.”
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A contemporary reinterpretation of the Shaker rail felt like a natural choice, not only because of Simons’s longtime fascination with the movement but also because he saw an opportunity to create a new way of interacting with objects within the home. “I am not the kind of fashion designer who’s interested in doing an object that is going to sit in an edition of eight in a gallery,” he asserts. “That just doesn’t speak to me at all.”
Simons’s excursion into product design, namely experimental storage systems, isn’t so surprising. Prior to embarking on a career in fashion, Simons studied industrial design at Genk’s Luca School of Arts, which left him with a deep reverence for 20th-century art and design—the radical, futuristic inventions of Joe Colombo, particularly the adaptable domestic system presented at his 1969 Visiona 1 exhibition; the meticulous leather-working of French decorative designer Jacques Adnet; and the art of American minimalists like Donald Judd and John McCracken—which, in addition to the Shakers’ intuitive functionalism and economy of form, Simons cites as references he looked to while developing his new system.
Simons says he envisions different uses for the design, depending on its location within a home, and has devised a series of accompanying accessories: for the living room, a magazine holder, wool throws, and matching pillows; for the entryway, a coordinated key holder, shopping bag, and slippers. “Because at the end of the day,” he muses, “an interesting and important object is one that you use all the time.”
