Walk through the main entrance of Liberty and the first sight to greet you is yards of fashionable silk. Waves of scarves, pashminas and pochettes drape from the walls, lounge on tables and affix themselves, just so, around the neck and shoulders of style conscious customers with a few hundred quid to spare on a billowy accessory.
On the trading floor of the 136-year-old central London department store, scarves occupy the number-one piece of retail real estate. They're fundamental to Liberty's Arts & Craft-flavoured ethos. At the till you can buy a reproduction of She Bought a Liberty Scarf, an illustrated 1930s "social skit" booklet by Joyce Dennys portraying "the versatile fashion uses of Liberty's scarves".
"They are a big piece of our profit," says the company's managing director, Ed Burstell. "And it's a category that in London, if not the world, we own." Accordingly, for a designer, "It's probably the most difficult area to get into."
Not surprisingly, Alexander McQueen and Christopher Kane are prominently displayed. But equally prominent are scarves by a hot new British designer: Richard Weston. Or, to give him his full title: Richard Weston, professor of architecture at Cardiff University and respected author of Alvar Aalto a monograph on the leading Finnish modernist, which won 1995's Sir Banister Fletcher Prize as the architecture book of the year. Professor Weston may be new, but he's not young he's 57.
His scarves' aesthetic DNA is entirely, literally natural: the designs are based on the high-resolution scans of minerals, fossils and stones that he makes in the converted garage of his home in the village of Dinas Powys near Cardiff. The resulting images are colourful, vibrant and entirely unique. "You can't beat nature at doing certain kinds of things," he explains with an enthusiasm that, it soon becomes apparent, is his default setting. "If you want subtlety of colour and intricacy of pattern and variation, nature is it."
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