While the Swedish furniture brand Ikea is obsessed with designing for the future, its most recent collection of housewares and textiles, Avsiktlig, is a blast from the past.
In the 1970s, 10 young designers in Sweden banded together to provoke what they perceived to be a conservative textile industry. When manufacturers called their pop-art inspired graphics, vibrant colors, and bold geometric patterns “unsellable,” they decided to skirt the establishment and produce their textiles themselves, controlling every part of the process, from design to fabrication. From there, 10-gruppen–or 10 Swedish Designers, as the collective was known internationally–took off.
10-gruppen was active until 2015, when the collective decided to close its business. Soon after, cofounder Tom Hedqvist contacted Ikea to see if the company would be interested in taking over the brand and being a steward of its archives (10-gruppen designers had collaborated with Ikea many times in the past). Ikea agreed, and immediately got started integrating some of the collective’s work into its own lines.
“10-gruppen represents the very best of Scandinavian design history–democratic ideals, aesthetic innovation, and an unbeatable feeling for materials. Their design style has not aged a second; it’s youthful, radical, and as bold today as it was in the ’70s,” Marcus Engman, head of design at Ikea, says in a news release.
While Scandinavian design has a reputation for restraint, textile companies like Marimekko, Svenkst Tenn, and 10-gruppen proudly bucked the norm, creating wildly inventive patterns that challenged the staid designs of the time. Now, in the context of maximalism‘s resurgence in the broader industry, it’s refreshing to see some of these designs receive a second life.