Good way to start the first full week of the New Year, I stopped at the Brunschwig et Fils showroom in San Francisco, looking for fabric with which to cover a late Georgian mahogany showframe stool. A delightful piece of sinuous design, our ace restorer Tony Smith had put the frame in shape, 
paying close attention to the condition of the seat rails, in anticipation of a shall we say ‘ample’ designer or client heavily parking their keister upon it.
As I was shopping for chintz, inevitably selecting several fabrics we had used before, it occurred to me that, in our galleries, with our own selves, we tend toward fabrics that suit us, and this remains fairly constant year to year. Particularly frustrating, then, the phenomenon of style and design obsolescence. It occurs to me that one of the outcomes of the worldwide fascination with interior design has been the mania on the part of fabric houses to turn out new items at a furious pace- and outmode existing lines at the same rate. Every interior designer who’s worked on a project for either a celebrity or been on a couple of episodes of ‘Changing Rooms’ feels the need to introduce a line of furnishing fabrics. Nothing is wrong, of course, with fresh and original, but, frankly, quite a bit of what comes out is bizarre and dated looking by the time it reaches the public.
To be fair, the fabric houses need to introduce a certain number of new designs to engender continued interest, by which I really mean gain the attention of the shelter publications. Feature mention in AD or Elle Décor seldom occurs with a fabric that has been on offer for half a century. It should occasionally, though, because designers tend to forget that fine quality, canonical design is always current.
What’s put me in mind of all this, of course, is the motto on the bottom of Brunschwig’s order blanks ‘GOOD DESIGN IS FOREVER’. So true.