He has papered our walls and carpeted our floors, enlivened our curtains, coats and cups, and even infiltrated Britain’s nuclear submarine fleet. Almost 130 years after his death, the Victorian arts and crafts designer William Morris has blanketed the world with his unmistakable brand of busy floral patterns, wrapping our lives with tasteful swathes of willow, blackthorn and pimpernel, peppered with cheeky strawberry-eating robins. There’s no escape.
“I started seeing Morris everywhere,” says Hadrian Garrard, director of the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, east London, speaking with the air of someone trying to shake off a stalker. “He’s on phonecases, umbrellas, walking sticks – and about a third of the Victoria and Albert Museum gift shop. I thought it was time that we addressed how we got here – how did William Morris, Britain’s greatest designer, go viral?”
The question lies at the heart of the gallery’s new exhibition, Morris Mania, which takes visitors on a chintzy romp through more than a century of floral fixtures, fittings, fashion and furnishings. It is a fascinating, if sometimes nausea-inducing, haul of pattern-smothered objects and stories, after which you, too, will probably notice Morris prints everywhere.
Their popularity began in the designer’s lifetime. A helpful timeline highlights the key moments that turned this avowed socialist into the unrivalled tastemaker to the middle and upper classes. With the opening of his first Morris & Co showroom on Oxford Street in 1877, and commissions to furnish St James’s Palace and Balmoral Castle, his reputation soon spread among the ruling elite.
Tsar Nicholas II of Russia caught wind of the fashionable Brit in 1895. He ordered 300 yards(275 metres) of Morris fabric and enough Garden Tulip wallpaper to line the apartments of his Winter Palace in St Petersburg. It didn’t end well. A 1917 photograph shows one of the rooms ransacked, after the palace was stormed by the Bolsheviks. Everything is destroyed – except Morris’s paper. His rustic vision of merrie olde England clings stubbornly to the walls.
After the copyright of his work expired in 1966, the tsunami of mass-market Morris merch was unleashed. Laura Ashley opened its first branded shop in South Kensington, London, in 1968, swamping a generation of homes with floral curtains and cushions, while during the Thatcher years there was another Morris boom, with Tory calls to return to “Victorian values”. With this came one of the most unlikely uses of Morris fabric in the exhibition: his rose-printed linen was used to upholster the seats of Royal Navy submarines – giving officers a nice reminder of cosy medieval Britain as they prepared to unleash nuclear war. Ironically, Morris had designed the pattern in 1883, just as he became increasingly critical of his country’s imperialist ambitions and the futility of war.
The exhibition design, by Sam Jacob, with graphics by Europa, is a gaudy treat, swallowing you into a dizzying Morris universe, with garish Morris carpet, loud Morris wallpaper and frilly Morris lightshades dangling from the ceiling, in a tasselled grannycore symphony. Vitrines showcase numerous Morris-patterned objects, from Past Times knick-knacks and museum shop scarves, to luxury Loewe handbags and collaborations with Nike and H&M.
“The patterns have escaped their original form by now,” says Jacob, whose work has long revelled in exploring the mimetic mutations of popular culture. “It’s a bit like in the film Alien – the patterns can land on anything and completely inhabit their host, whether that’s a mug or a submarine.”
One vitrine, focused on the commercial realm, shows how his designs have transcended the usual boundaries of high and low taste, being embraced by both exclusive couture and mass-produced tat. Morris might be synonymous with staid middle-class traditionalism, but even Habitat – founded by Terence Conran to bring sleek modernism to the masses – embraced Morris mania. Its 1971 catalogue flaunts Chesterfield sofas writhing with Honeysuckle fabric, their designs proudly described as being “based on a Victorian original”.
Morris’s popularity in Asia also gets a look-in. There is a Japanese yukata, a type of kimono, made of the famous Strawberry Thief fabric. Look closely and you will see Hello Kitty faces peering from the foliage. There’s a new Morris badminton kit from sports brand Yonex, its busy patterns likely to dazzle any opponent into missing the shuttlecock.
There’s also a ravishing pair of Morris patterned wedding jackets, made by local designer Zahra Amber for her wedding at the gallery, which she had embroidered in Kashmir. They stand alongside a dresser brimming with countless other trinkets donated by Morris fans, from a ceramic toast rack to a pack of cards. An entertaining film, made by Natalie Cubides-Brady, with help from US academic Sarah Mead Leonard of Twitter account Morris on Screen – features clips from more than 100 films and TV shows where patterns appear, from University Challenge to Call the Midwife, cementing Morris as a backdrop to countless lives.
China is now one of the biggest Morris markets in the world, ever since the V&A’s touring exhibition in 2023 smashed box office records. An iPad scrolls through the vast range of Morris-patterned merchandise available to buy from Chinese online marketplace Temu (“Shop like a billionaire!”), much of which is now AI-generated. “We bought these for £2.99 each,” says Garrard, gesturing to a wall of Morris exhibition posters made in China – for shows that never happened. “There are tons for sale online, all generated by AI. We could have covered the whole of Walthamstow with them.”
This computer-generated, factory-made garbage might be anathema to the “authentic” Morris products that are still being produced by skilled artisans, their laborious manual processes (celebrated in a soothing film) adorning everything from Brompton bikes to Tinker & Tallulah’s lampshades. But in a way, the automated AI future aligns with Morris’s own dreams. For his entire career, he was torn between a desire to make his designs accessible to everyone, while also wanting his workers to be well paid and live joyous, fulfilling lives. He concluded that it simply wasn’t possible without a radical socialist revolution.
In a wry nod to this, Garrard has included a copy of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani’s provocative 2018 book, which pokes out of a mannequin’s pockets. It imagines a time when “society based on waged work becomes as much a relic as the feudal peasant”, a vision not unlike that of Morris’s novel News from Nowhere. We’re almost there – if you can ignore the accusations of intellectual property theft and forced labour that plague sites such as Temu, as an AI-generated caption helpfully points out.