Capturing the City
While many outdoor fabric collections take their creative cues from the natural world, in-demand Italian designers Arianna Lelli Mami and Chiara Di Pinto of Studiopepe headed in the opposite direction for their new collection for Élitis, available at Abbott + Boyd. Archiutopia – a portmanteau of ‘architecture’ and ‘utopia’ – features motifs taken from architecture that become abstract by their repetition.
‘Zoe’ (above left) looks like a like a sheet of graph paper, folded to create an interlocking cityscape, while ‘Argia’ (above centre) features a simple tessellated house-shape, and a gently three-dimensional. texture. Other fabrics are more free-form and gestural, such as ‘Despina’ (above right), with its casual repetitive brushstrokes woven into the fabric. Studiopepe thinks of each of these as a utopia – the product names are all taken from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a 1972 Italian novel that describes 55 fictitious cities, many of them parables about different cultures, languages and human experiences.
