When Londoners Anna Murray and Grace Winteringham launched Patternity in 2009, they had no idea how prescient their tagline, “Seeing pattern everywhere – from the mundane to the magnificent,” would turn out to be. On the eve of their fifth anniversary together, the world is more attuned to pattern than perhaps any generation in history. And Patternity has grown from a web gallery of curated images into a profitable concern.
The business began as a research tool, the two women exhibiting inspiring patterns from life and nature – a lunar landscape, a cluster of insect eggs, an aerial shot of planted fields – on the Patternity website. They also established a manifesto based on their belief that “a shared awareness of pattern has the power to positively shape our world.”
“We use pattern as a tool to tune people into what they see every day,” Murray says, speaking on the phone from her studio. “And we help them see coincidences – like how similar a shell is to the pattern of a storm – that help them understand life.”
Murray’s background as an art director and Winteringham’s as a product designer for brands like Tom Dixon and Alexander McQueen proved useful when they later established a creative agency that produces photo shoots and bespoke patterns for commercial clients. Eventually, designers such as Chinti & Parker and the ceramicist Richard Brendon enlisted the duo to inject new energy into their brands. According to the team behind Clarks Originals, which collaborated with Patternity on two limited-edition shoe lines, they’ve become “cult pattern pioneers.”
Perforated steel is referenced in the small-scale print they designed for Clarks’s shoes.
This month is particularly exciting for the duo. Besides launching a range of micro-patterned desert boots for Clarks, they’ve played their biggest role yet in the London Design Festival, which concludes on Sept. 21. Their giant interactive Kaleidohome opened to the public as part of A Place Called Home, a major installation in Trafalgar Square. The pop-up cabin is kitted out with reflective walls and kaleidoscopic images of Patternity’s trademark circles, lines, triangles and squares – the “fundamental shapes” that form the basis of pretty much everything in the home and beyond. It uses pattern and repetition to explore the overlooked details in our domestic world.
“We wanted it to be something people could engage with and leave thinking about the world,” says Murray. “It puts each person at the centre when they play with it [and] then photos of them are uploaded into a gallery.”
The pair have also released a new collection of fashion and homewares in collaboration with the Imperial War Museum. The 10 pieces will pay homage to “dazzle painting,” the World War I practice of painting warships with optical illusions to throw off the Germans. Each item features an updated dazzle pattern of black-and-white shapes.
This autumn, pattern is a mainstay of the fashion world. Prada plumbed 20th-century pattern archives and emerged with an avant-garde interpretation in complementary colours, while Dries Van Noten was all over trippy stripes. Valentino unveiled its wildly popular spots-on-stripes motif. And Clare Waight Keller of Chloé, practically allergic to pattern herself, designed a series of fabrics in sassy geometrics reminiscent of the 1980s Memphis Group.
In a collaboration with Great Britain’s Imperial War Museum, Patternity created a line of postcards and tableware inspired by dazzle painting on First World War vessels.
At the recent spring 2015 shows in New York, meanwhile, not a stripe or check was left unexamined at Suno. Gareth Pugh and Edun explored pattern in monochrome. And DKNY showed kaleidoscopic shapes in all manner of colour combinations. Granted, pattern has long been used to decorate clothes, be it the polka-dot lining in your blazer or the floral print on your sundress. And yet, even sworn minimalists like Calvin Klein are suddenly swathing shoppers in stripes.
“Absolutely no doubt, there’s been a huge increase in interest,” says Murray. “People are wearing patterns with confidence, integrating them into their homes.” On the decor front, Patternity has been plucked to design products from a $5 roll of washi tape to a $20,000 table for private clients.
But Murray is quick to distance herself from the trend-forecasting game. “We don’t concern ourselves with that too much,” she says. “Our philosophy is not to be up-to-the-minute.” Nonetheless, she says, the customers who log into the website have become “a who’s who of the biggest brands in fashion and interiors. And because we know who’s using the website, we can anticipate when the next pattern wave will happen. We knew stripes would be massive when we posted our [stripe research] two years ahead [of the trend].” Next in their research came textural patterns such as marbling, iridescence and bold shapes.
Ceramist Richard Brendon enlisted the company to provide daring motifs for his china.
The appeal has trickled down from designers and trendsetters. “If you go out on the streets, you see the stripes in particular,” says Murray. “They’re incorporated into business fashion everywhere. Finance guys wearing jazzy socks are not seen as something extraordinary any more.”
With striking geometric pattern coming of age, you could say Patternity arrived at just the right moment. “It’s quite an extraordinary time,” says Murray. “So many pioneers in technology, particle physics and quantum physics are looking into pattern as a way of understanding the world.”
With that in mind, Murray and Winteringham are working on their first book: a cross-disciplinary exploration of science, nature, art and food using pattern as a unifier. It will appear next year to coincide with Pattern Power, the biannual festival they helped launch in London last year. “We aren’t experts in all pattern, but we use it to bring the world together,” Murray says. “The possibilities are infinite. It’s in the name of our company, and that’s what’s interesting to us.