Established in 2000 by Jonathan Levien and Nipa Doshi, London-based Doshi Levien is an internationally acclaimed design practice. Their work celebrates the hybrid and fuses cultural ideas, technologies, story telling, industrial design and fine craftsmanship.
Jonathan Levien and Nipa Doshi: ‘Our dream is to create work that celebrates an equal exchange and plurality of values, relating to different societies, material and visual cultures.’
Doshi Levien was the international Designers of the Year of EDIDA 2015.
Jonathan Levien & Nipa Doshi
Composition 92% new worsted wool, 8% nylon
Durability 100.000 Martindale
Width 140 cm
Crafted by design duo Doshi Levien, Lila is a vibrant upholstery textile. It combines two voluminous unicoloured yarns: a regular yarn in the weft and an irregularly textured slub yarn in the warp.
The sensual colours, inspired by the Royal Indian miniature paintings, glazed Chinese ceramics and Modernist paintings, comprise natural, deep tone-on-tone colours. The name of the fabric, which are derived from Hindu mythology - Lila means "play" or "dance" - reflect this.
To realise their vision, Doshi Levien mixed more than 100 gouache colours, then hand-painted them onto samples. These were used as reference in production to dye the yarn with great accuracy.
Nipa Doshi: “Working on Lila and Raas has been a very deep and intense exploration in aesthetics of mixing colour. We wanted to create colour by mixing paints by hand, rather than choosing colour references from existing colour charts.”
Durable, Lila fabric is suited to private and public spaces alike.
Lila fabric
design Doshi Levien, 2018