Cork Comparisons

Let's continue yesterday's thread by focusing on a material employed by Eileen Gray in her interior design pieces and see how this material is currently also used in fashion. The material in question is cork and Gray mainly employed it in her screens and tables.

Some of Gray's best pieces incorporating cork were designed for the E-1027 villa in Roquebrune.

The table she designed for the living room or the terrace of the villa featured an extending rectangular cork tray with rounded corners mounted on a base of nickel-plated tubular metal with a retractable U bracket attached to the tray.

Her famous dressing screen/cabinet (1926-1929) was instead made of painted wood covered in aluminium leaf, and fetaured glass shelves and drawers made from cork lined with silver leaf. This piece was intended as a cabinet with storage facilities for a bathroom and it was placed in the master bedroom, acting in this way as a screen separating the night table area from the washbasin.

The cork integrated in the screen/cabinet was supposed to invite tactile and visual sensations; cork was instead used for the table to deaden the sound of cutlery and crockery, so it had in this case a functional and practical aim rather than a decorative purpose.

In fashion cork has been used for shoe soles and wedges since the 1500s (remember the perilously high wood or cork platform calcagnini), but it has often been employed also for bags.

Philip Treacy's "Chinese Garden" headdress carved from cork for Alexander McQueen's "It's Only A Game" Spring/Summer 2005 collection remains instead among the most extraordinary pieces made in modern times with this material.

More recently cork appeared in McQ by Alexander McQueen's A/W 2015 collection. Inspired by street and youth culture with some random references to punk included, the collection featured not so new leather jackets, washed blue jeans and printed sweats and T-shirts, but there were sparkles of innovation in the silvery jacket matched with a miniskirt. Both the pieces were made with a thin cork material coated in silver foil (apparently, a technique taken from shoemaking).

Cork is also the main material for the "Rainbow Jimmy" clutch designed by Jill Haber. Her pieces are all hand-made in New York City by European trained craftsmen and this design in particular seems to reunite the Italian cork manufacturing skills with the exuberance of Pop Art. Haber will be at Tranoï Femme in Paris (from 6th to 9th March 2015), so people going to the trade show may discover more about her there. In the meantime, it's interesting to see that, in some cases like McQueen's collection, cork has been used for Fall designs rather than Spring/Summer (it seems to be a material more fit for this season…), so, who knows, maybe it will make further appearances on the Parisian runways in the next few days.