Celebrating Maharam and Paul Smith’s 20-Year collaboration

Guests included leading names in Melbourne’s architecture and design community who were thrilled to be joined by special guests from New York City – Maharam President, Tony Manzari, Maharam VP Sales, Brendan Clarke and Maharam brand Ambassador, Nicole Manzari.

To celebrate the anniversary, a selection of Maharam textiles by Paul Smith were upholstered on the iconic Artek Stool 60s by Alvar Aalto and displayed in the stunning Anibou Melbourne.

Celebrating Maharam and Paul Smith’s 20-Year collaboration

When Paul Smith attended an exhibition of Gio Ponti’s work at London Design Museum in 1999 he honed in on a beautiful silk textile produced as part of Maharam’s Designs of the 20^th Century. This became the lining of his following season’s jackets and thus began the dialogue with Maharam. The collaboration has born over 40 designs across upholstery and wallcoverings – most recently Metered Stripe, Concord Stripe, and Ribbed Weave. This trio of woven upholsteries brings the British fashion designer’s dynamic vocabulary of colour and pattern to textiles suitable for both indoor and outdoor use.

During the evening at Anibou, guests were treated to delicious canapes by renowned chef Andrew McConnell of Handmade Events, whilst sipping rhubarb gin & tonics and the infamous Melbourne Gimlet cocktail.

As a thank you to all those who attended, each guest took home a limited edition book by Maharam Media that highlights twenty designs from the collaboration, spanning both textiles and Maharam Digital Projects.

Related: Adam Cornish and District collaborate

Attendance and special guests:

Country Director of Kvadrat Maharam, Vanessa Chavez

Maharam Brand Manager at Kvadrat Maharam, Katie King

Maharam President, Tony Manzari

Maharam VP of Sales, Brendan Clarke

Maharam brand AMB, Nicole Manzari

All travelled to Melbourne from the USA to support this event.

Further information:

Founded in 1902 in New York, Maharam is a leading creator of textiles for commercial and residential interiors. Recognized for its rigorous and holistic commitment to design, Maharam embraces a range of disciplines from product, graphic, and digital design to art and architecture. Maharam textiles are included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Stedelijk Museum, among others. Maharam is the recipient of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Design Patron Award for its longstanding support of art and design.

This month marks twenty years of collaboration between the renowned British designer Paul Smith and Maharam. Paul Smith and Maharam initially met in 1999 when Smith discovered Maharam’s reissue of Gio Ponti’s 1930 textile I Morosi alla Finestra (The Lovers at the Window) during a Gio Point retrospective at the Design Museum in London. Paul Smith’s request to repurpose the figurative silk window covering as a jacket lining initiated a conversation that led to Legacy Maharam Studio lead – Mary Murphy inviting him to design a textile of his own. Bespoke Stripe, featuring vibrant multi-coloured stripes embedded in a quintessential menswear pinstripe.

Over the last twenty years of close dialogue and exchange, the collaboration has generated more than forty designs for upholstery and wall covering alike. Ranging from a plethora of inimitable signature stripes to adaptation of Smith’s flea market finds, each of Smith’s designs begins with an interest in reinterpreting classic motifs through idiosyncratic applications of pattern, colour and scale.