Lucienne Day

Désirée Lucienne Lisbeth Dulcie Day OBE RDI FCSD (née Conradi; 5 January 1917 – 30 January 2010) was one of the most influential British textile designers of the 1950s and 1960s.

Day drew on inspiration from other arts to develop a new style of abstract pattern-making in post-war British textiles, known as ‘Contemporary’ design.

She was also active in other fields, such as wallpapers, ceramics and carpets.

Born in Coulsdon, Surrey, England, and raised in nearby Croydon, Lucienne Day was half-Belgian, the daughter of an English mother (Dulcie Conradi) and a Belgian father (Felix Conradi), who worked as a re-insurance broker.

Initially educated at home, she attended Woodford School in Croydon from 1926–9 and a boarding school at the Convent of Notre Dame de Sion in Worthing, Sussex, from 1929 to 1934.

At the age of 17 Lucienne enrolled at Croydon School of Art, where she developed her interest in printed textiles.

She went on to specialise in this field at the Royal College of Art, where she studied from 1937 to 1940.

During her second year she was sent on a two-month placement to the firm Sanderson, where she worked in the company's large wallpaper studio.

However, as Lesley Jackson notes: “The reality of working in a factory was an eye-opener for Day, who, with her growing taste for modern design, found it hard to adapt to the conservative style of the company.”

In March 1940, during her final year at the RCA, Lucienne met her future husband, furniture designer Robin Day, who shared her enthusiasm for modern design.

Following their marriage on 5 September 1942, the couple set up home at 33 Markham Square in Chelsea, London, furnishing their flat with Lucienne's hand-printed textiles and Robin's hand-made furniture.

Due to wartime constraints on textile manufacturing, Lucienne was unable to pursue her career as a designer for several years.

In the interim she taught at Beckenham School of Art, but as soon as the war was over she began practising as a freelance textile designer.

Initially the main openings were in the field of dress fabrics, where her clients included Stevenson & Sons, Argand, Pasman Fabrics, Silkella, Horrockses and Cavendish Textiles.

In the longer term Lucienne's aim was to design furnishing fabrics, so she crossed over into this area at the earliest opportunity.

Her first significant client was the Edinburgh Weavers, who produced two screen-printed furnishing fabrics in 1949.

Shortly afterwards, she was commissioned to design a stylised floral by Heal's Wholesale and Export (later known as Heal Fabrics), the textile-producing subsidiary of the London department store Heal & Son.

This fabric, Fluellin (1950), marked the start of her long relationship with Heal's, which lasted until 1974.

The Festival of Britain, a landmark exhibition held on London's South Bank in 1951, proved a decisive turning point in Lucienne Day's career.

Seizing the opportunity to showcase her talents, she created several textiles and wallpapers which were displayed in various room settings in the Homes and Gardens Pavilion.

Her most famous design, Calyx, was created as a furnishing fabric for an interior designed by her husband Robin Day.

Hand screen printed on linen in lemon yellow, orangey-red and black on an olive-coloured ground, Calyx was a large-scale abstract pattern composed of cup-shaped motifs connected by spindly lines, which conjured up the aesthetic of modern painters and sculptors, such as Alexander Calder and Paul Klee.

Although Heal's were initially sceptical about Calyx, it proved a success, selling in large quantities over many years.

Also exhibited at the Milan Triennale in 1951, where it won a Gold Medal, this design generated a new school of pattern-making which became known as the 'Contemporary' style.

Calyx was widely emulated by other designers both at home and abroad.

Lucienne also designed three wallpapers for the Festival of Britain: Provence, block printed by John Line & Son, and Stella and Diabolo, screen printed by Cole & Son.

Following the success of Calyx, Lucienne Day was commissioned by Tom Worthington, Heal Fabrics’ managing director, to design up to six new furnishing fabrics each year.

In 1952, Day and her husband moved into a Victorian-era house in London at 49 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea.

Day transformed the interiors into a model of ‘Contemporary’ design and the house was featured in several magazines.

The ground floor served as the Days’ joint studio for almost five decades.

Over the course of their 25-year partnership, Lucienne created more than seventy designs for Heal's. Although she designed for other firms as well during this period, her textiles for Heal's form the core of her creative opus and include a string of patterns which typify the forward-looking post-war era, such as Dandelion Clocks (1953), Spectators (1953), Graphica (1953), Ticker Tape (1953), Trio (1954), Herb Antony (1956) and Script (1956).

At this date Lucienne's textiles were characterised by energetic rhythms and a spidery, doodle-like graphic style.

Although apparently spontaneous, however, her designs displayed considerable technical skill, particularly their colourways and repeats.

She began working with abstract designs in textiles and helped popularize this textile style in England.

As well as pure abstracts, she often created stylised organic patterns incorporating motifs such as skeletal leaves, spindly stems, feathery seed heads and butterflies.

Later in the decade, responding to new artistic trends such as abstract expressionism and the architectural fashion for floor-to-ceiling picture windows, Lucienne's designs for Heal's became more overtly painterly and much larger in scale.

Dramatic full-width patterns, such as Sequoia (1959) and Larch (1961), both featuring trees, and rugged textural abstracts such as Ducatoon (1959) and Cadenza (1961), reflect a significant evolution in style.

Beginning in 1962, around the same time she began working as a design consultant for John Lewis Partnership, Lucienne Day was made a faculty member at the Royal Designers for Industry.

Between 1987-1989 Day became the first woman Master of Faculty.

Five years after teaching Day began focusing on her works with printed fabrics and wallpaper designs.