This Kvadrat tote bag brings together two design luminaries, Raf Simons and Peter Saville

As a teenager in the small town of Neerpelt in Belgium, close to the Dutch border, fashion designer Raf Simons discovered the work of seminal graphic designer Peter Saville in his local record shop – and with it, a portal to another world. ‘I come from a village of 6,000 people, so forget about Berlin, London, New York – what are you talking about?’ he said in 2013. ‘So I picked up things because of the imagery. We have to think back in time – no computers, no mobiles, no nothing – it was pure isolation in a way.’

These images included the cover art for Joy Division and New Order, alongside the rest of the Factory Records roster. It would prove formative. Not only did Simons – who founded his eponymous label in 1995 before stints at Jil Sander, Dior, Calvin Klein and Prada, where he is currently co-creative director – draw inspiration from Saville’s visual language, which balances an aesthetic discipline with the pulsating energy of British subculture, but he would also end up collaborating with the Manchester-born designer numerous times across his career.

Kvadrat’s Technicolour Fleck Tote Bag, by Raf Simons and Peter Saville

This included Simons’ A/W 2003 collection, which featured Saville’s Factory Records sleeves – a motif repeated in his S/S 2018 show, presented in New York’s Chinatown – while during his tenure at Calvin Klein he enlisted Saville to re-design the American brand’s logo prior to his first runway show in 2017.

A new project from Kvadrat brings Simons and Saville together once again with a tote bag which draws on each of their longtime connections with the Danish textile house: Simons has worked with Kvadrat since 2014, including his ‘Shaker System’ of functional home accessories, which launched in 2022 (‘utility, function and materiality,’ Simons told Wallpaper* of the collection’s design philosophy at the time).

Saville has been working with Kvadrat since 2006, advising on its visual identity, as well as designing the ‘Technicolour’ fabric range and designing Kvadrat’s London showroom with architect David Adjaye, among other projects (he was also responsible for introducing Simons to the company). ‘They work at very different tempo: graphic design is very high-speed, fashion is pretty high-speed, pop culture in general is high-speed. What Kvadrat do is slower, but with depth,’ Saville told Wallpaper* of the brand in 2022.

The tote bag itself takes its shape and design from the signature Kvadrat/Raf Simons Tote Bag – perhaps Simons’ best-known creation for the house – while the fabric is chosen from Saville’s ‘Techicolour’ range. The exact material is ‘Techicolour Fleck’, a wool ‘rural grafitti’ textile, available here in 0190 black and 0150 grey. The bag also features a woven label featuring the fabric and colour number, ‘a clean graphic gesture and subtle reference to his iconic work for Factory Records,’ say Kvadrat.

‘Peter and I have had so much understanding, respect and love for each other over so many years and we are both strongly connected with Kvadrat. In a way the bag represents those relationships,’ says Simons. ‘We both believe strongly in something individually but we are also interested in others’ creative work and how things kind of click in a creative world. With the tote bag, it is not literally that we did this thing together, but it’s how things click.

‘Like the word interzone, I have been obsessed with that word forever,’ he continues. ‘For me, it’s not about crossing over music and fashion and art, it’s more this undefined unclear area between the zones, as the word says.’

‘The significant term to mention in any kind of understanding of my work is interzone,’ adds Saville. ‘The overlapping space between design, art, fashion, music, cinema, photography, architecture, interior... I was never specifically interested in graphics or typography; I was interested in how two-dimensional culture could reflect the mood of the moment – the feeling of the now.’

The limited-edition tote bag is available at shopkvadrat.com and in selected stores.

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