L'Art de Vivre: Wearing Florals

The wearer of floral is a lover of the natural world, and everything naturally beautiful that grows in it.

Floral print is the oldest in textile history. Before trendiness, before fashion weeks, before anyone was tracking seasons, there was the human impulse to put the living, blooming world onto fabric and to wear it. To make the transient, permanent. To carry beauty the way you carry anything that you wish to keep: close.

Every civilization that has ever made cloth has made it with flowers as inspiration. Chinese silk. Indian chintz. Persian carpet. The Parisian toile. The Liberty print. The Japanese motif on indigo ground. Each one a different conversation with the same obsession: the flower that does not last, preserved in the thing that does.

To wear a great floral is to love nature with the lightness of someone who stops to smell the roses — and the peonies, and the lilacs…