Independence Toile Medium Tote — Custom Green / Orange on Tinted Belgian Linen / Cotton
Before there was a flag, before there was a Constitution, before there was a national anthem, there was toile. English manufacturers figured out almost immediately after the Revolution that Americans would buy fabric celebrating their own independence — and that the best way to sell it was to wrap the Founders in the iconography of classical antiquity. The "Apotheosis of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington," copperplate-printed around 1785, is the most ambitious of these textiles: Washington in a chariot drawn by leopards, Franklin beneath a banner declaring "Where Liberty Dwells There Is My Country," the goddess of Liberty, the figure of Fame with her trumpet, and a Stamp Act notice nailed upside down to a Liberty Tree. The whole thing reads like an eighteenth-century comic book drawn by someone who had studied both Plutarch and the Declaration of Independence.
Quadrille's Independence Toile takes that source material and runs it through a completely different process — hand screen-printing on Belgian linen-cotton, which allows for the kind of color work that copperplate never could. This green and orange colorway is the most unexpected version: warm, autumnal, closer to a harvest palette than a patriotic one, which is exactly what makes it work year-round rather than just the week of July Fourth. Nine yards. The kind of pattern that starts a conversation and doesn't let it end at upholstery. In time for the 250th birthday of the USA, we have a limited supply of totes made from this custom fabric.
