For years, leather has been the king of materials. Why wouldn’t it be – it has all the refinement, style and sensations of a premium product. We add it to our cars, we wear it on our bodies, we accessorise in it and we even cover our designs in it. It is simply beautiful, and intensely difficult to get right.
Yet it is in velvet where Napoleon chose to make a statement about something else. Is it that velvet empowers us and thus, must only be considered for the rarest of occasions?
“A throne is only a bench covered in velvet”
conures powerful illusions of what a material can do, and yet with velvet, it feels right to say it that way.
Velvet is onomatopoeic when you think about it. You want to touch the word as much as an object covered in all of its majesty. Velvet feels like an emotion too, “I’m feeling ‘velvet’” speaks of a warm glow with an ounce of trepidation when moving away from that feeling.
We can find it easy to wax lyrical about a material that is designed to be soft on touch, and our senses but what other material can do the same?