The Human Touch

“So often in health care, designs become generic in order to meet all the performance criteria,” says the designer Laura Guido-Clark. “It’s a market where you need a human touch and a sense of emotionality, but you feel like everything has become sterile.” This month, Pallas Textiles hopes to correct that by releasing the Freehand collection, a range of high-performance, sustainable, mass-produced fabrics that look back to traditional techniques like embroidery, crochet, and lace making. The design team, headed by Guido-Clark, took on the challenge of balancing the delicacy of handcrafting with the demands of the health-care industry. “For example, we had to get a beautiful flower to look like it’s actually hand-embroidered and floating on the surface, and then we had to work with the mill to tie the flower down so it has a high resistance to abrasion,” she says. “Generally, when you go for high-performance, or apply special coatings, things get stiffer and flatter. But it was very important for us to retain softness. We were just so grateful that it came to life.”

WEB

www.pallastextiles.com