CULT REISSUE: byGraziela

“I REMEMBER THE 1980s’ prints most clearly. My mum did an ’80s black and white floral and stripe collection - and I remember me and a friend, aged about 12, going out into our quite suburban town wearing these matching floral outfits - including these weird little leggings. It was really embarrassing. “
So says 32-year-old Nina Nägel, daughter of renowned German textile designer Graziela Preiser who grew up so immersed in her mother’s bright, happy, retro graphic ’70s and ’80s prints on bedding, wallpaper, clothing and crockery that to her they were always just a part of the landscape. That was until Nina, a graphic designer based in London, had her son, Jakob, now 1.
“It was then I think that I really realised how they were more than just a really substantial part of my life. Especially when I dug some of the old ’70s pieces out of my mum’s attic and all my friends starting asking where they could get them. ”

Graziela Preiser’s famed prints were never commercially available. Nina explains how her mother used to work for a magazine (”the equivalent of Red magazine today”) that offered the pieces as mail-order specials to its readers. The magazine made her mother famous, and such was the cult that resulted in her native Germany that Nina gets fans sending her emails detailing the bedlinen they had when they were little. “But then even I used to have sleepovers and all my friends would turn up wearing her pyjamas. Everyone was matching!”

For Nina, this was all impetus for relaunching the brand - a move she started with her One, Two, Three bedlinen range earlier this year (see the print, top picture) - which has since grown to include wall organisers, pyjamas, posters made from original 1970s wallpaper cuttings (see picture, bottom) and a brand new collaboration of graphic mugs and plates with UK design maestro Thorsten van Elten (above). Reissued wallpapers and new posters are just some of the items coming soon, as soon as Nina can decide which of her mother’s amazingly modern-looking patterns to reissue next.

In fact, Nina wants to make this part of the new byGraziela company a people affair, just as the label always was. She’s asking readers to email in with suggestions of which archive print (see the website here) should be made into a full collection next. “I want it to be a dynamic collection,” says Nina. “to always be growing and have something that people want to come back to and discover.” Nina’s role in the company may not seem as immediately creative as her mother’s - who Nina remembers was forever cutting and pasting in her studio at their apartment in Hamburg - (”she’s amazed at what I do now on computer”), but she sees it as just as creatively fulfilling in its own way. “She’s amazed I don’t want to design for the collection as a graphic designer myself. But I’m incredibly proud of and excited about her work and its possibilities. And I’m finding it just really fun trying to figure out what people are looking for and what appeals to them. I’m amazed people are so emotionally attached to the things they had when they were little and they want similar things for their children - it’s not just us creating a product in a studio. It’s like we’re all doing it together.”

COMPETITION: To win one of byGraziela’s wall organisers, worth £48, email us at mail@littlebigmagazine.com telling us which of Graziela’s archive patterns you’d like to see reissued (click on the dates at the top of the page here to see each pattern from 1970 to 1981). A winner will be picked at random on 15th July. [PLEASE NOTE THIS COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED]