RIP Lucienne Day

Lucienne Day was the foremost British textile designer of her period. Day’s furnishing fabrics, of which the most famous was the Festival of Britain abstract pattern Calyx, hung in every “contemporary” living room in Britain. The reality of “art for the people”, dreamed about by the Victorian William Morris, was finally achieved by a female designer in the middle of the 20th century.

Désirée Lucienne Day RDI (née Conradi) (January 5, 1917 to January 30, 2010), was born in Coulsdon, Surrey, England. Inspired by abstract art, she pioneered the use of bright, optimistic, abstract patterns in post-War England, and eventually grew celebrated worldwide.

The textile designer Lucienne Day in 1952

Calyx, the fabric design that brought her fame

Day was daughter of an English mother and a Belgian father who worked as an insurance broker. She attended convent school in Worthing, and at 17 enrolled in the Croydon School of Art, where she discovered a love of printed textiles. Later she attended the Royal College of Art, where she was a top student.

Through her career, Day won many awards, including the International Design Award of the American Institute of Decorators in 1952, and the Gran Premio prize at the Milan Triennale in 1954. In 1962, she was made a Royal Designer for Industry (RDI), an award which honours designers who have achieved “sustained excellence in aesthetic and efficient design for industry.” She was the fifth woman to be made an RDI.

She believed that good design should be affordable, and in 2003 told the Scotsman newspaper that she had been “very interested in modern painting although I didn’t want to be a painter. I put my inspiration from painting into my textiles, partly, because I suppose I was very practical. I still am. I wanted the work I was doing to be seen by people and be used by people. They had been starved of interesting things for their homes in the war years, either textiles or furniture.”

An exhibition of Lucienne Day’s textiles and her designer-husband Robin Day‘s furniture, ‘Robin and Lucienne Day: Design and the Modern Interior’, will be at the Pallant House Gallery from 26 March to 26 June 2011 in Chichester – the city where the Days retired in 2000, in order to be closer to their Sussex cottage, where Day spent much of her time in the garden.

Read the Guardian obituary on Lucienne Day

Read more about Lucienne and Robin Day at mydeco.com