Former Textile Society President Dies

Mention Lucienne Day and what follows inevitably is ‘Calyx’, the fabric designed for her husband Robin’s dining room in the Homes and Garden Pavilion at the Festival of Britain. The success of ‘Calyx’ – including a Gold Medal at the Milan Triennale and its recognition by the American Institute of Decorators – ranked Lucienne among internationally-known designers and is hailed as the launch-pad for her career. Yet ‘Calyx’ is rather like Van Gogh’s ear: a tiny detail, and a distraction from the entire story. The designer herself was to say in the 1990s, when the trendy world went retro, that another query about ‘Calyx’ might just be one too many.

Far more impressive than the success of a single design was Lucienne’s consistent understanding of the marketplace. Having studied at the college of art in Croydon, where she grew up, she entered the Royal College of Art in 1937, at the age of 20. By 1940 she had received her DesRCA, mounted a degree show that caused favourable comment and married Robin. During the following decade, at first as a teacher during the war and then as a designer of dress fabrics, she observed and learned, disliking the fact that her Belgian maiden name, Conradi, opened the doors of British buyers prejudiced against indigenous designers, and that dress fabric designers’ colourations often bore little resemblance to the final cloth. Furnishing fabric designers, on the other hand, could provide high quality design for the masses. This matched her ideals, which were to be played out with Heal Fabrics Limited over a period of 20 years.

Only the fifth woman to be elected to the RSA’s Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry, Lucienne wore her success lightly. She had a gracious reserve that belied the international requests for her services on juries as well for her designs, which also included fabrics for Edinburgh Weavers and a British Celanese-Sanderson joint promotion, carpets for Tomkinson and Royal Wilton, wallpapers for Crown, glass cloths for Thomas Somerset, and a series of patterns for Rosenthal porcelain and for Rasche, the avant garde German wallpaper manufacturer. She brought to these tasks a sense of timeliness that melded her knowledge of European abstract painting and her love of drawing from nature. As her compositions moved from juxtapositions of solids and linear marks, through textural essays to the bold geometrics of the 1960s, her ability to suggest organic movement and weightless mass remained. Highly disciplined whether composing with pen, ink and gouache, or through monoprinting and collage, that same discipline determined her move away from designs for mass-production in the early 1970s, when she found little empathy with the trend towards countrified florals.

The creation of ‘silk mosaics’, her large abstract panels, emerged while she was design adviser to John Lewis. This was a role she shared with her husband from 1963 until 1987 and, despite their single studio, it was one of their rare collaborations. Composed of tiny squares of patchworked silk, the initial inspiration arose from a commission to design shutter doors for John Lewis Newcastle. In many cases privately owned, the mosaics have had far less exposure than her designs for consumer goods. Nevertheless, those in public spaces – such as ‘Window’, commissioned for the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in 1986 – attest to her sustained eye for colour and texture.

The RDI Faculty’s first female Master from 1987-1989, Lucienne next became the first Honorary President of the Textile Society, serving from 1992-2002. She represented us with flair in Spain on the first of the Society’s European study-trips, and many of us remember the wry sense of humour she demonstrated at meetings, as well as the thoughtful contributions she made to committee discussions and policies. Until not long ago she also chose the winner of the Society’s Lucienne Day Award, instituted in 1993 for a graduate who demonstrated excellence in contemporary textile design and, now, a lasting tribute to her distinguished career.

(Désirée) Lucienne Day: 1 January 1917 – 30 January 2010. Survived by her husband Robin and her daughter Paula.