Halfpenny London create gowns using Little Greene National Trust prints
If you follow us on Instagram you’ve most likely heard me talk about Little Greene, a British, family run business which makes the most beautiful paint and wallpaper. My entire home is painted using their delicious colours, as is Halfpenny London’s office, studio, fitting rooms and boutique, so it’s obvious I’m a huge fan. Little Greene’s philosophy of homegrown, high quality products made with love resonates with me so when the opportunity arose to collaborate with them on a very special project I couldn’t wait to get started!
I’m thrilled to say we have collaborated with Little Greene to create amazing gowns for their new ad campaign, using their brand new National Trust Heritage wallpaper collection. We’ve taken three paper designs and turned them into amazing textile prints using the fabrics we normally use for our wedding dresses.
We worked alongside Little Greene and creative agency Ceremonious on the campaign to bring these new wallpaper designs to life in a magical and meaningful way. The perfect fusion of fashion and interiors, a delightful celebration of self-expression told via mixed media.
We were faced with the challenges of representing the wallpaper in fabric form and we knew getting this right would be imperative.
“A lot of our wallpapers are traditionally made - specifically surface printed - and the machines that are used to make those papers date back to the 1800s so there are hundreds of years old.”
We used multiple Halfpenny London hero fabrics in this collaboration and had them digitally printed with the wallpaper design. This was a huge challenge as it’s a completely different process to printing on paper. We wanted to make sure we did it justice and my amazing team in house spent weeks working with an amazing digital printer who helped us walk through the processes of separating these colours and making them stay as close to these beautiful papers as possible.
We looked back through our own collections and chose outfits which we felt worked really well with the different designs. For example, the Burges Snail print is so fun and we wanted to represent that in the clothes so we decided on an amazing bustier and big wide leg trousers, pairing those with our favourite Neptune blazer or detachable Sun sleeves, creating a really playful, yet elegant and contemporary look. The Tulip print was perfectly channelled in the drama of our Oliver dress and Mikado Christian skirt, while the Beech Nut looked incredible, hugely oversized on our Stella dress and Bow coat with an extra long train.
We took pains to perfect the placement of the designs on the clothes, making sure they lined up exactly when we were sewing the seams, exactly the same as one would do with wallpaper. The results speak for themselves! I’m in love with these magical pieces and thrilled to see my pieces rendered in these delicious colours.
Watch the video below for a sneak peek behind the scenes of the Little Greene ad campaign photoshoot with an incredible dream team, including myself, the Little Greene team, photographer Barnaby Roper, Ceremonious, and more.
The Little Greene X National Trust collection II is available now via littlegreene.com
Love,
Kate & the Halfpennys xxx