Happiness

The Great Color of China was the second Larsen collection inspired by the Silk Road. The Pleasure Dome of Kublai Khan, introduced in 1968, took a broader, thematic approach that utilized traditional patterns and imagery of Silk Road countries, from China to Uzbekistan. Happiness was designed for this earlier collection and features the traditional Chinese motifs of clouds, waves, and rainbows that Larsen had seen on Ming dynasty embroideries. The popularity of this design led to its revival in 1972, when it appeared in two new colorways, Red and Red Earth. The original Happiness was a complex design requiring ten separate screens for its production. When they developed the Red Earth colorway they felt that it needed more delineation between color masses so they added black details. In order to achieve this effect they added one more screen and had to remake all of the originals.