Deep Dive: Backdrop’s Fresh Take On Archival Textiles

“It was like vintage shopping of the best kind,” Backdrop creative director Natalie Ebel says of diving into the treasure-trove archive of sister brand Schumacher. For the resulting Archive collection, Ebel hand-selected a range of the textile house’s patterns from the last century, reinterpreting them through her own playful and witty lens. There’s Edith: a surrealist take on classical and neoclassical objects featuring cameos of lyre-playing cherubs and shells within a lattice frame; equestrian Tanbark, a reinterpretation of a toile from 1957; Horses, also from the 1950’s, now re-tailored for today with a clever combination of architectural and equine elements; and Palazzo, a four-panel mural based on a 17th-century drawing of a grand atrium. Fanciful and ornate, the designs are digitally printed in Brooklyn, New York, on textural, nonwoven paper using a Greenguard Gold–certified process. backdrophome.com, schumacher.com