Kaplan

Shirley Craven, the designer of this textile, became chief designer and art director for Hull Traders in the early 1960s, shortly after graduating from the Royal College of Art, London. Kaplan, which captures a rugged landscape—possibly the dramatic rocky coastline of Hull where Craven grew up—proved to be a consistently popular design for the firm. Launched in 1961 in three color schemes, Craven added three more in 1963. The abstract reference to the landscape speaks to a larger aesthetic trend of the period that also features in Zandra Rhodes’s Stalactite (1964) for Heal’s Fabrics and Pentti Rinta’s Myrsky (Tempest) (1977) for Marimekko Oy. In addition to its market popularity, Kaplan was included in the exhibition Brown, Craven, Dodd: Three Textile Designers at the Whitworth Art Gallery at the University of Manchester in 1965. The exhibition catalogue noted that the artists’ “work suggests close affinities not only to contemporary architecture but to contemporary movements in painting.” Indeed, the heavily saturated pigments, used in hand screenprinting the textiles, rest on the surface like paint, giving the finished fabric a stiffer, more substantial feel that conveys a sense of luxury.