Fabric & Feel: Interview with Margate designer Beatrice Larkin
Textile designer Beatrice Larkin weaves a signature style crafted from a lifetime of fabric fondness
In a world of endless generics and dupes, it’s not always easy to, firstly, cut through to the customer and, secondly, attain some brand recognition. When the customer next sees a design of yours and instantly knows who created it - that’s gold dust.
“When you start to build a brand you want to try to create that signature style, so people start to learn about you.”
Margate designer Beatrice Larkin specialises in woven textiles, accessories and interior products and her fabrics have become very recognisable for their unique, blurred edges and broken geometrics.
The hand-drawn sketches that Beatrice starts out with on a design run through all her woven designs. The marks made when she first put pen to paper are still noticeable in the finished fabric, making features of the inky lines, intricate patterns and blotches.
Production takes place in the north of England, where Beatrice works with highly skilled manufacturers to create small runs of her woven designs at a Jacquard mill in Lancashire before the fabric is washed and finished in the Yorkshire Dales. But it all begins in Beatrice’s Margate studio.
“I get my inks out. There will be a lot of mark-making,” says Beatrice “They might be really messy, but in the back of my mind I’ll be thinking ‘OK, what do I want this to be at the end point?’, like what kind of scale and what kind of product.
“Then I’ll probably put them through Photoshop and play around to work out how I want the fabric to repeat and how large a scale does that need to be.”
There are currently two materials in Beatrice’s collection: Merino wool for throws, cushions and accessories, and the more robust recycled cotton suitable for cushions, upholstery and curtains.
The Merino wool is more commonly used in the fashion industry for high-end knitwear because of the fine, soft fibres of the Merino sheep. The more recently launched cotton collection is woven from rejected fabrics from the clothing industry, re-spun and ready for a new purpose.
“They both come from spinners in Italy,” explains Beatrice. “That’s sent to the mill in Lancashire - it’s woven, brushed and washed and then it’s sent back to me on the roll. Either me and my studio, or I work with some local Margate makers as well, to sew up the fabric into products. Although we also sell by the metre, too.”
FABRIC IN THE BLOOD
Beatrice was recently awarded the Start Up Award as part of the Women’s Launch Lab Incubator 2024 - one of 10 female entrepreneurs chosen out of hundreds of applicants. During an intensive three-day programme they were able to draw on the expertise of fellow innovative female entrepreneurs, growth and marketing strategists and public-speaking coaches, culminating with each pitching their business to venture capitalists and angel investors, including author and founder of National Women’s Enterprise Week (NWEW) Alison Cork MBE, fashion designer Akshata Murty and Judy Naake MBE, entrepreneur famous for the St Tropez brand.
“Stepping back and being outside of the business, at the bigger picture, which is very hard to do day-to-day, was really good and gave me a real confidence boost as well,” she says. Beatrice started her business straight after completing a Masters at the Royal College of Art in 2013, with her final collection gaining interest from buyers such as furniture and homeware retailer Heal’s.
After graduating, she began the search for a British mill that could produce her designs to scale and in 2015 Daylesford Organic helped fund her first run of fabric, which was woven in the Cotswolds and Yorkshire. This collection was sold at Daylesford and the launching pad for future manufacturing. In spring 2017 she started selling at Heal’s and launched her first collection at Clerkenwell Design Week. The move into the fabrics industry was inevitable, with Beatrice’s father owning Canterbury’s Gordon Larkin Fine Wallpaper & Fabric.
“He’s kind of nearing retirement now. But he is still there and has been for like 35 years, plus,” she says. “My mum is also a textile designer, so in our house there were just rolls of fabrics that my dad was selling, or that my mum was buying and then making into things. I was just surrounded by fabric, basically.
“There’s this design show in Chelsea Harbour every year. And I used to go with my dad to look around the fabric showrooms. That’s a big memory of mine, too. So yeah, I guess it’s just in the blood, isn’t it?”
Beatrice returned to Kent three years ago, this time to Margate and its creative hub, and has continued to grow her client base, with Turner Contemporary and Harbour & Tide stocking her products locally, while the likes of Made, Studio Ashby, Conran and Partners, Tate Modern and Piglet in Bed have all taken the Beatrice Larkin brand.
While she forges her own career in the textiles world, Beatrice’s experiences growing up have helped to take away the fear factor of going it alone.
“I think understanding the lifestyle of having your own business and what you get back from having your own brand and being able to have that control is what I gained that much from my parents,” she says. “Being able to choose your own path.”
INFO: www.beatricelarkin.com
