Münchner Stoff Frühling 2018
Munich Fabric Spring
The Munich fabric Spring, which has been gathering the crème de la crème of European home textile manufacturers on the Isar every March for 21 years, is an exclusive club. A four-day showroom event throughout the city that attracts around 2,000 trade visitors - interior designers, interior decorators and furniture dealers. If you want to exhibit here, you can wait a few years until the organizers give it the green light.
One company that is expanding the round of 33 exhibitors this time is Backhausen. Four years ago, Dr. Louise Kiesling, VW supervisory board member and niece of Ferdinand Piëch, bought the weaving mill in financial difficulties in the Austrian Waldviertel and started a complete restruction. This is an affair of the heart for her, explains Kiesling, who also holds a 20 percent share in the architectural office Coop Himmelb(l)au and, as an Austrian and fashion designer, is particularly enthusiastic about the company archive with designs by Josef Hoffmann, Otto Wagner and Koloman Moser. The latter is the focus of the current collection. The graphic sample prints in black and white are striking creations of the Viennese Art Nouveau, which Koloman Moser, as co-founder of the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätten, decisively shaped. But Kiesling does not want to rely on tradition alone, as the cooperation with fashion shooting star Artur Arbesser - also an Austrian - proves.
The collections are just as opulent and dressed up as the ambience in which they are presented - be it the Künstlerhaus on Lenbachplatz or the Prisco-Haus. Here you will find the top manufacturers of curtain and upholstery fabrics as well as those for carpets and wall coverings.
And for the finest silk damasks in the world: while Rubelli can look back on more than 150 years of tradition and produces in the Venice area, Dedar is active as a publisher and also launches the Hermès Home collection. In recent years, both brands have done a lot to update their traditional damasks. Dedar is a step further, with new colours for the evergreens from the program and not least with an emphatically progressive visual language. Rubelli is now following suit with the latest collection "In Technicolor" (old fabrics, new colours - the concept is well-known) and a trend book in which fashion photographer Giovanni Gastel has worked. Rubelli shows that these are absolute luxury goods with "Aurum", a fabric woven with gold threads, which the Italians originally created for the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and for which no less than 500 kilograms of gold were spun.
Alongside silk fabrics, velvet is the hallmark of the two Italian companies - a fact that is currently very much in line with the brands, as the popularity of velvet in interior design remains unbroken. Rubelli offers it in silk (heavy, special shimmer) or cotton. With "Adamo & Eva", Dedar wants to have the most shiny one in its range, whose special features should be its high weight and low indentation. Both stamps turn the theme further, decorate the velvet with check patterns (Rubelli) or lashlike fringes details (Dedar). Right next door Sahco shows a velvet under the title "Proof", which wants to convince by its robustness: it allegedly withstands 100,000 abrasion cycles. The term "Martindale" is often used here - a special test in which the velvet is rubbed against a woollen standard fabric with a specified weight. The higher the "Martindale" number, the more abrasion-resistant it is.
Kvadrat's showroom strives to convey the brand essence of textile know-how, design appeal and design quality. In recent years, the Danes have developed into model students of architecture, design and art. While other upholstery fabrics hang heavily on the hangers, Kvadrat presents them as folded mini stacks on shelves at eye level. Just one example of what Kvadrat does differently.
Always striving for a coherent overall concept, Kvadrat has now combined the carpets of Danskina and Kinnasand under the brand name "Kvadrat Rugs". "Pieces" by Isa Glink is a particularly beautiful illustration of this association in which she combines pieces of a handwoven kilim from India (Kinnasand competence) with pieces of hand-knotted carpets with Persian and Tibetan knots (Danskina competence). Carpets, whether knotted or woven, are also very popular with others: Jab Anstoetz, for example, is relying on his new collection of hand-tufted pieces made of New Zealand virgin wool in many rich solid colours.
Wool is no longer only used for carpets or upholstery, but also as a curtain fabric. Curtains that feel warm and fluffy like your favourite winter sweater: At Christan Fischbacher it is a model made of baby alpaca, Loro Piana shows models in warm brown shades of cashmere or vicunja - the finest and most expensive wool in the world. Like silk, wool is flame retardant and complies with the B1 standard of the German Fire Protection Ordinance for public spaces. Incidentally, the range of object-suitable fabrics made from special synthetic fibres and yarns such as Trevira CS has also become considerably more diverse - and many praise the fact that these materials have improved significantly and felt more natural and supple.
The sound-absorbing properties of fabrics are currently being further developed by many manufacturers. With Création Baumann, this is particularly easy to understand, where you are guided between two curtains that absorb sound up to 0.9 aw and clearly dampen the room acoustics, more precisely by up to 16 decibels, as if you were wrapped in cotton wool. It's almost like that: with the new "Acoustic Divider Vario" curtain, a flame-retardant molleton with a special foil lies between two layers of fabric.
