Look to fashion for new ideas for your home

Simion Hawtin-Smith considers the crossover in trends between fashion and interiors, when searching for home inspo

Spotting trends early is a great way to help your projects become more successful. And one way I do this is by turning my attention to high-street fashion stores, looking at social media trends, and seeing what the larger shops and fashion designers are producing.

The beauty of this is that fashion trends tend to filter down, so you do get a bit of a head-start with your work. I find that looking at the colours and patterns in clothes stores gives me a better understanding of what people are looking for when it comes to styling their homes. What someone chooses to wear may be a brief glimpse into their overall style, and it’s a starting point to develop into how they dress their home.

So it’s really no surprise then that the larger fashion houses are moving into furniture designs and home decor. From Gucci to Paul Smith, many now feature interior designs, offering predominantly smaller pieces such as scented candles and cushions, as these are simpler to make.

So if fashion houses are focusing on home designs, it makes sense for home designers to look at fashion too!

When I started out reupholstering chairs, I would pick bright tweeds as I love how Vivienne Westwood used the fabric in her designs.

More recently, while working on Money for Nothing we saved two vintage chairs from landfill and I recovered them in beautiful fabric, which I’d previously seen on a dress designed by Claire Christie for her brand Clarabella Christie, using her wonderful Disc ‘O’ velvet. Claire’s inspiration comes from her hometown architecture in Dunfermline, with the fabric I used based on a window off street level, on a Victorian facade.

Seeing this and other wonderful fabric designs on clothes gives me the confidence that they can be adapted to work with furniture too. But you can also apply the same logic in reverse. In 2020, I worked on a Parker Knoll Merry-go-round chair that I covered in a bold spray-paint design fabric from Timorous Beasties. I loved the fabric so much, that as I had some left over at the end I decided to use it to customise a vintage denim jacket.

Fashion and interiors are inextricably linked, and opening your eyes to the colours and patterns being used for our clothes could provide the inspiration for your next furniture or interiors project.