mydeco profile: Thomas Paul’s larger than life style

I’ve been obsessed with the graphic-oriented home line, Thomas Paul, for several years now. Thomas Paul, the designer behind his namesake brand, creates a myriad of signature designs running the gamut from textiles to melamine. He’s even started creating personal accessories– keep your eyes out for his Themes and Variations-inspired scarf. mydeco readers will remember my profound love for all Fornasetti delights; I can’t wait to wrap his take on Lina Cavalieri around my neck, strange as that may sound!

Paul masterfully reinterprets such paradigmatic styles as Hellenic Classicism to Victorian Gothic, maritime, and Chinoiserie. Despite the diversity of his aesthetic, each line feels unmistakably Thomas Paul; be it a black silhouette plate or an octopus lacquer box, you feel his hand behind it, which is what makes his collections at once so recognizable and peculiar–in the best of ways.

Forsaking a career in fashion, Thomas Paul followed his passion for textiles to create one of the most original home brands on the market– and year after year, consistently one of my favorites.

Image credit: Thomas Paul

mydeco:   Are textiles what bind you to design– be it in fashion or interiors? What precipitated your career change from fashion to home?

Thomas Paul: Yes, I think textiles are my first love. I remember as a child walking through department stores with my mother and having this compulsion to touch every piece of clothing that I passed. I had this need to feel every fabric. I still do the same thing today, plus I am obsessed with reading the fiber content labels. I could probably tell you what a fabric is made of with my eyes closed.

My change from fashion to home was really just by chance.  I guess I always was interested in interiors, and I liked working on the home textiles design projects we had in school, but I never really thought seriously about it because I was always obsessed with fashion and clothing. I was working for a company that made ties as a designer and colorist and I was feeling a little bored and looking to make a change.  I had already done my own neckwear collection for them, but ties are limited. Men will only accept so much when it comes to pattern and color, plus your area to work on is so small, and I like large-scale designs. Anyway, I wasn’t thrilled with doing ties anymore, but I liked where I worked, and we worked with a really great silk printing mill, so I was trying to figure out how I could utilize the capabilities of my company and the mill, but without having to make ties.  We also did beautiful silk scarves, so that was my first thought, and actually all of the designs I did in my first pillow collection were intended to be silk scarves, but my heart was not really in it; in 1999, silk scarves were not exactly a hip and happening thing, they are having a bit of a resurgence right now though. So I was always obsessed with throw pillows, I had the pillows for my couch before I had the couch, but all of the pillows I liked were out of my price range at the time; it was either spend $150 on a cool pillow (and only Jonathan Adler and Hable Construction were doing things I actually liked), make custom pillows, or get something cheap at a discount retailer. Even IKEA did not have cool pillows at the time.  It was either a $19.99 pillow or something over $100.

So, my concept was, hey why not take these scarf designs and print them up on silk and in a square format, just like a scarf, but sew a solid fabric to the back and make it a pillow?  We had the capability at our mill to print the fabric and I thought there was a hole in the market for a well designed, modern throw pillow that would retail out at $50.00-$60.00. And the rest is history.

Image credit: Thomas Paul

mydeco: Do your concepts for a new collection always start with fabric and radiate into other mediums?

Thomas Paul: Not at all, actually fabric is probably one of the last things I think about.  It starts with a concept or an idea that I want to express. It usually starts with the item. There are concepts that I like for one thing, like a plate, which may not translate to any other item, but then there are designs that work well across most of the items that I make.  When I started, I wasn’t so attached to using silk, I used it because that was what the mill I was working with did best, I am more concerned with the design being interesting and then figuring out what it is going to go on.

Image credit: Thomas Paul

mydeco:  You’ve made melamine cool. How did that happen?

Thomas Paul: I cannot take all of the credit. About a year after I launched my pillow collection, the French Bull melamine collection came out.  I think Jackie from French Bull really deserves the credit for making melamine cool again. Everyone else picked up on it and it became a trendy new category for specialty stores.  I was looking for a way to do some plates and trays and I liked that I could do some things that looked more traditional, but put them on a material like melamine instead of porcelain to give it a bit of a spin.

Image credit: Thomas Paul

mydeco: Your work touches on so many styles– neoclassicism, chinoiserie, folk/maritime, etc. Is there something that binds all of these themes to you?

Thomas Paul: It is always about the flatness for me.  I like two-dimensional design.  I think the thing that links everything I do is the simplicity, scale, and color.  My concept from the start was always to mix all different design styles, but in my own way so that they look good together.

Image credit: Thomas Paul

mydeco: Do you consider yourself influenced by surrealism? What artistic movements drive your aesthetic?

Thomas Paul: It changes every year.  This season, surrealism, yes, I was having a major Fornasetti obsession last year.  I always like to pay homage to designers and artists that I like and have influenced me in some way, usually from pop art and minimalism– Lichtenstein, Warhol, Stella, Le Witt.  As for other designers, Pucci  has been a huge influence on me, as well as Vera, and Gene Meyer, and of course Hermes scarves–I guess anyone who has worked in silk scarves. It is like a little club.

Image credit: Thomas Paul

mydeco: You’ve recently introduced pareos and scarves to your line. Would you ever consider introducing more clothing?

Thomas Paul: Yes, it is funny that I am back to scarves again, but not silk this time.  I think that what I am trying to do is make a new type of design company.  Before, designers were well known for one thing– usually in fashion, and then if they did home, it was through a license and took its cues from the fashion line. I was in fashion and created a home collection that had the energy of fashion, but now I like the idea of going back into clothing and accessories, but not one necessarily influencing the other.  Making them both parallel and equally important. I don’t want to be known as a fashion designer or a home designer–the same ideas are moving around everywhere these days. I don’t see the distinction.

Image credit: Thomas Paul

mydeco: Your luddite collection is in homage to the movement. Do you personally experiment with making textiles by hand?

Thomas Paul: No, I am totally in love with my computer.  In school we had to draw and paint designs in by hand.  It was fine for sitting in class, but we all knew that this was ridiculous and not the way of the future. In 1995 the computer systems were not totally the norm in design studios yet, which totally changed in five years, but you still needed a computer with a huge memory and fairly sophisticated and specialized software.  Now I basically do all of my design work on a laptop with an off the shelf design program!

mydeco: Which collection do you identify with or are the most proud of?

Thomas Paul: I really like my first pillow collection.  It is the purest expression of my style, probably because I had no idea what I was doing.  Once you have a sales history and you start doing shows, it can influence how you design, obviously you need to make things that sell and do follow-ups to successful designs. But I try to do things every season that I love, even if everyone else thinks it is crazy and is a sales risk.  You must or else how will you find the next great hit?

And that, readers, is why I adore his work. He is willing the re-imagine the classics in our collective design history. For more on Thomas Paul and his vibrant collection of work, take a look at his profile.