Fashion designer, textile artist, collagist and creative polymath Lars Nilsson has spent decades moving between disciplines and continents. Yet throughout it all, one motif has remained constant: the stripe. As he lends his signature motif to our fifth anniversary collectable box, we meet Nilsson at his most notable current collaborator, Svenskt Tenn, to read between the lines
Google Lars Nilsson and one thing quickly becomes apparent: stripes. They appear everywhere – across textiles, collages, interiors and objects – in endlessly shifting combinations of colour and scale. They even wrap the limited-edition Svenskt Tenn box accompanying this issue of Vogue Scandinavia. For a creative who has spent decades moving between fashion, art and design, it is the one constant thread.
The fascination with the pattern began early. “I was going through a lot of childhood things recently, and I found lots of woven mini rugs I was doing when I was about five or six,” Nilsson says. We are sitting in Stockholm's Svenskt Tenn store, surrounded by Nilsson's creations. Shoppers drift past, blissfully unaware that the man behind many of the trays and textiles they are admiring is sitting just a few feet away. “I made them on mini looms, about five centimetres, and they were all multi-coloured stripes.”
/Lars_Nilsson_Issue_31_4_dbc2d9bcdc/Lars_Nilsson_Issue_31_4_dbc2d9bcdc.jpg)
Lars Nilsson’s Anacapri print for Svenskt Tenn sits atop two prints for the Swedish design house by Josef Frank. ‘Anacapri’, €200/m. Svenskt Tenn. ‘Mirakel’, €260/m. Svenskt Tenn. ‘Tree in bloom’, €260/m. Svenskt Tenn. Photo: Patric Persson