This Textile Brand Is Blurring the Lines Between Runways and Interiors
With the heeled-boot gait of an indie rocker and a perfectly imperfect mane of black hair tumbling past his shoulders, Bengt Thornefors seems an unlikely champion of upholstery-weight textiles. But looks, as everyone knows, can be deceiving.
When the entrepreneurial Swede was appointed creative director, in 2022, of the nearly-200-year-old textile brand Sahco, he was tasked with mining the tension between past and present to create collections worthy of a true textile maison. As cofounder of the bedware brand Magniberg—which, like Sahco, is now owned by Kvadrat—Thornefors brings with him decades of expertise in the fashion industry, working early on in his career under Acne Studios cofounder Jonny Johansson and later making his way to Saint Laurent, in the mid-2010s, with then creative director Hedi Slimane, himself no stranger to an alt-rock mindset.
But interiors held a special appeal, and Thornefors’s proven ability to move seamlessly between worlds made Kvadrat’s CEO, Anders Byriel, take notice. “Anders is interested in art, he’s interested in culture,” Thornefors says. “I think he wants to learn more about other points of view.”
A fresh perspective is exactly what Thornefors offers. For Sahco’s first press presentation at Kvadrat’s New York City headquarters, he approached the space as a white-box gallery, interweaving the fabrics—tailored into garment bags and hanging from rolling racks—with fine art photographs and furnishings from Swedish institution Svenskt Tenn. “I was a bit nervous. I’ve heard people say Jonathan [Olivares, the space’s architect] can be a bit hard to please,” Thornefors says. After the event, however, Olivares texted his approval.
The new collections have a heritage sensibility—decorative florals are a Sahco mainstay—refracted through a contemporary Scandinavian lens. Thornefors points to lime-green embroidery on a jet-black background, for example. “At the end of the day, we sell more than fabric,” he says. “We sell emotions.”
This story originally appeared in the September 2023 issue of ELLE DECOR. SUBSCRIBE
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