Description

As Gretchen Bellinger enters her 30th year as a leader in the interior textile industry, she continues to challenge and delight with a fabric collection that, at once, defines the times while embracing a classical sensibility. It's this quality - a masterful duality - that sets Bellinger apart. With the eye of an innovator and the heart of a purist, she has created an entirely new lexis in the world of textile design; straddling a paradox that today has become her signature. This is no where more evident than with the introduction of her latest fabrics. Combining the state-of-the-art with the "tried-and-true," Bellinger has emboldened her collection with daring new palettes, innovative print and weaving techniques, and an array of natural and synthetic textiles. In doing so, she has made the familiar fresh, and has given even her most visionary designs an appealing warmth and accessibility. Bellinger was influenced in her early years by her chemical engineer father, who instilled in her not only a keen sense of organization, but a desire to look beyond mere convention; to understand that the way people lived impacted the products they needed or sought. After graduating from Skidmore College and receiving her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bellinger joined Skidmore Owings & Merrill's Chicago office, where she developed many of the aesthetic sensibilities she continues to draw upon today. It was there - working among the likes of Walter Netsch, Bruce Graham and Myron Goldsmith - that Bellinger first perceived a gap in the interior textiles market. By 1975, after working in sales and marketing for Knoll and V'Soske, Bellinger produced her very first collection of thirteen natural-fiber fabrics, including the much-revered Limousine Cloth® broadcloth.