Menswear designer Katie Eary has teamed up with Ikea on a limited
edition collection of affordable soft furnishings and dinnerware.
The Giltig collaboration showcases Eary’s fish, cat an eyeball prints on
the retailer’s home furnishings, as part the Swedish brand’s
fashion-forward exclusive collections for 2016. The Eary collection
launches in April and includes tableware and home textiles that the
retailer states will “turn up the volume at any party”.
The collaboration is part of Ikea’s first partnership with a number of
fashion designers, including the British menswear designer, as the
homewares retailer looks to respond to current trends and fuse influences
to give its customers “cutting-edge design at affordable prices”.
“A decade or so ago, you could get an idea about who a person was from
their cd’s or books. Now it seems that, as far as the home goes, furniture
and personal bits and pieces are the last things left that show your
identity,” explains Katie Eary. ”I’ve learned loads through working with
IKEA – it’s great to see my designs in a totally different context. There’s
so much you can do within home furnishing and so many boundaries to break
still.”
Ikea’s creative leader, Henrik Most added: “We can learn a lot from how
fashion designers work with colours, prints, patterns and shapes. They
constantly have to re-invent themselves and what they do – and are used to
working in the forefront of pattern and colour development.”
Alongside Eary’s collaboration, Ikea is also working with fashion
designer Walter Van Beirendonck and Swedish textiles designer Martin
Bergstrom. Van Beirendonck’s line of ready-to-cut fabrics, stationery,
rugs, and ceramics will launch in June showcasing the designer’s
playfulness and avant-garde flair, while Bergstrom’s collection of bed
linens, textiles, paper products, rugs, bowls, glassware and metal objects
created using just black, white and shades of grey will hit stores in
September.
Images: Katie Eary for Ikea