William Morris, Recycler
Design: we cycle through phases, then later recycle again. Clothes from the 70s and 80s are becoming popular again. The cycle of rebirth of design trends seems to have speeded up in my own lifetime, but certainly it's been going on for centuries.
In the mid-nineteenth century, William Morris, a British novelist, artist, designer, and perhaps not coincidentally socialist, was an early adopter of Gothic Revival, the trend that brought about Victorian Gothic style. Morris became a key person in the founding of the Arts and Crafts movement. His own designs for textiles and wallpaper were replete with flora and fauna. He was fascinated with the natural world. And his designs were very like medieval millefleurs (thousand flowers in French) tapestries.
And those tapestries were very like the famous rosette windows in Middle Ages cathedrals like Notre Dame in Paris. Which again were like millefiori (thousand flowers in Italian) glasswork.
Morris was recycling a trend, but updating it and making it his own. In the same way, Candace Bahouth, a needlepoint and mosaic artist working in Britain in 2009, has updated the millefleurs look in her tapestries and pillow designs.
And just to bring it ALL up to date, in the past several years, the design world has been enamored of floral flourishes in design. So everything old does become new again.
