Jane Gish, CEO of Ann Gish, joins us this week to discuss the brand’s new collection of outdoor fabrics inspired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Drawing on five thousand years of human creative expression, The Met x Ann Gish collection has yielded dozens of unique patterns – now available to art lovers in a convenient performance fabric.
Raymond Paul Schneider: When did you first start to develop this new collection?
Jane Gish: We began work on this new collection in late Summer 2022. We had been wanting to add outdoor-grade performance fabrics for several years, but all the factors finally fell into place, from the mill we worked with, to finding the right pieces from The Met to serve as inspiration.
RPS: What was the overall timeline from conception to achieving the final design?
JG: The thing about a lot of outdoor fabrics is that they are boring. You are lucky if you get an awning stripe. The prospect of introducing a new product category that was, design-wise, in line with our rich patterns and colorful palettes felt perfect to us!
RPS: What was your initial inspiration, and where did the idea(s) come from?
JG: The Met! We sifted through some pieces we had looked at earlier in our collaboration with them that we had loved, but for several reasons never made sense to proceed with. We whittled it down to 5 pieces and began pattern development and color work.
RPS: Please describe your overall creative and design process.
JG: Totally motivated by our gut and intuition. We choose what we like, what makes sense to add to our line, and what feels inspiring!
RPS: Did you have a specific audience or theme that you had in mind?
JG: COLOR! We wanted to appeal to the designers and customers who love pattern and color and probably felt our sentiment that most outdoor fabric is a snooze-fest.
RPS: Please describe the methods, tools, and materials you used to develop and prototype this design?
JG: I love pattern development from pieces of art. It’s so fun to assess the original piece and select the parts of the pattern that you can turn into a fun yet sophisticated repeat. For the Ritual pattern, we literally zoomed in on a section of this ancient Chinese bronze wine container, pulled the bronze on bronze inlay pattern out using Procreate, and experimented scale and repeat direction (Symmetrical? Rotational? Half Drop?) before finding the perfect setup.
Once we had each pattern developed, the mill wove a color sample blanket with a million different warps and wefts. For each pattern, we chose about 10 colorways, and then assessed all 5 patterns together, as we wanted a balance of colors and patterns.
RPS: Please describe any challenges that affected the design and perhaps steered you to an entirely new final design?
JG: Outdoor fabric is a slightly different beast than our interior-grade fabric (though who would not like an outdoor duvet for their hammock? Am I right?) Once the fabric was designed and we were working on construction, we had a few false starts given the weight of the weaves and the deniers of the yarns. We used some additional reinforcement to make sure the outdoor cushions were as sturdy as they were gorgeous.
RPS: Describe your overall brand DNA and Ethos.
JG: Sophisticated, beautiful, unexpected, timeless, and original.
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