inspiration is a two-way street

What if the past could predict the future? And how would we appear today to history’s greatest thinkers? At Scabal our links to visual art make up some of our deepest roots, and our upcoming project, Scabal Masters Gallery, seeks to reach deeper still by asking a new question entirely: what if inspiration worked backwards?

Scabal’s designers turn to canvas to explore the query – you’ll find it there, asked and answered. Our Masters Gallery will take the lenses of some of fine art’s greatest minds, pull them through history to the present day and turn their gaze on Scabal itself.

Beginning with Johannes Vermeer, Scabal imagines how the Dutch master might have used his mother tongue – paint – to represent ours: fabric. Delicate tones and playful shadows figure Scabal’s Autumn Leaves collection in a classic still-life, complete with fruit bowl, wine bottle and a tailor’s thread and scissors.

Fast forward to the 20th century, abstract artist Piet Mondrian follows Vermeer for Scabal Masters’ second iteration. Here, richly textured velvets sit in luxurious defiance of their minimalist lines: cut to echo Mondrian’s unmistakable grids and geometric shapes, the work represents the ultimate marriage of material and medium.

Scabal’s commitment to art, and to its power to inspire, is long standing. Back in 1971, we commissioned Salvador Dali himself to create twelve paintings based on his ideas of what men’s fashion might look like in the year 2000 (then nearly three decades away). This year, we released twelve new fabrics, each drawing on one of Dali’s commissioned paintings: fittingly named Vision, Scabal’s latest collection looked to a past visionary for contemporary innovation. From Vision’s painting-to-fabric, Scabal Masters inverts the equation to deliver fabric-to-painting; playful speculation to exquisite reality.

Continuing into 2020 and beyond, Scabal’s Masters Gallery proves that inspiration can work both ways after all.