Do you know where I have gotten lost many times?
At the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent. I often end up in rooms where I have been before and think: how can that be, I already saw this painting, didn't I? Not infrequently, I am praised for my excellent orientation skills (ask me at any time where the North Sea is, and I'll point you in the right direction). But for some reason, this talent eludes me within the walls of the MSK, where I apparently lose my bearings easily.
When the MSK celebrated its 225th anniversary in 2023, Wolvis was asked to design a scarf, an MSK Wolvis, for the occasion. We took a look at the museum's floor plan for inspiration (floor plans, aerial photos and, by extension, google maps, have inspired Wolvis collections before), and I understood why I was always lost...
1 • Getting inspired by architectural elements
The interconnection of the MSK's spaces, without corridors, with one space flowing into another, with vistas at the corners, gives a disorienting effect. We looked for graphically interesting pieces from the floor plan, where columns alternated with load-bearing walls, where partition walls were interrupted and where convex walls transitioned into right angles. We translated these pieces into knitting patterns, unrecognisable as an architectural plan on the elongated canvas of a scarf, and just as disorienting.
2 • Finding the right colours
For the colour choice of this series, we gave carte blanche to Cornelia. Cornelia, who prepares webshop orders on Mondays and Thursdays in the Wolvis studio, has a great love for pastel shades. She prefers to dress in soft, woolly pink tones, finished with details in their brighter variants. Her distinctive style is beautifully reflected in the colours of the summer version of the MSK scarves. I often fall back on predictable colour combinations (a great fondness for saturated colours) and wanted to pass this task to someone with a different perspective. I'm glad I managed to delegate this part because this colour palette feels entirely new and fresh to me, and I hope you've noticed that too.
3 • The final result
This MSK series was also knitted in Waregem by our man in the factory, the man behind the knitting machine, the man I send more WhatsApp messages to than my own partner :) Thanks, Alex!
Want to know more about Alex and his knitting machines? Make sure to read this blog post, where we have a chat with him and talk about his role in our productioin process.
