Maryléne Madou talks to us about her new venture and printing with The Silk Bureau.
Recently opened is this glorious shop in the heart of Genk in Belgium. What a treat it was to see all the pieces we have printed for Maryléne in recent times.
Each year, we launch a scarf that’s about dachshunds. I have two dachshunds myself and some of my customers really look forward to the new dachshund scarf each year. The personal approach is very important.
Tell us how your passion for design developed?
I studied textile design at LUCA School of Arts in Ghent, Belgium. At that time, around 2012, a lot of designers were experimenting with digital print design, such as Mary Katrantzou, Paul Smith, Dries van Noten… I was very much fascinated by the process and since I always was passionate about drawing, I really saw the opportunity of combining the interest for painting and drawing and the interest in textiles. That’s when I decided to apply for an exchange program at the University for the Creative Arts in the UK, that hosted a Fashion Print course.
When living in the UK, I won an international fashion design contest that was curated by the Fashion Museum of Hasselt, which gave me the chance of doing an internship at one of the most important print design studios in the USA. I left for Los Angeles and after that I knew I wanted to start my own collection, exclusively using my own printed fabrics.
Prints really became my obsession. I moved to London, packed with a plan: gaining experience in the fashion industry while starting to do research to become self employed.
Pushing the online presence of your designs into a store must have been a big step. How was it?
After a lot of planning and sampling, the store was launched on 25th May 2019. Funny enough, I met my Belgian partner when he was on holiday in London. So I moved back to Belgium with lots of international experience and started Marylène Madou, the company. A store where I could invite my clients in a warm and luxurious environment was definitely needed, complimentary to the webshop.
Tell us about your current designs
My collections are always about combining my original drawings with digital techniques, to become prints that really have a lot of detail and colours.
My drawings mostly are about fauna & flora, I love to visit gardens and stroll through museums with vintage floral wallpapers and textiles (something I cherish from my time in England), I often travel back to London for inspiration, or other European cities with a rich history, such as Amsterdam and Barcelona. The most important feature of my collections are always this: everything needs to start with original illustrations that I paint or draw myself, because I feel that that’s going to be the feature that sets me apart from bigger brands. Also when you’re printing digitally, it’s great to be able to show so much detail from your original paintings in the textile prints. Something where the Silk Bureau is on of the best in the industry I feel.
What plans do you have next?
© The Silk Bureau Limited 2024
The processes involved in digital textile printing causes the original fabric to shrink. If you are printing scarves, the size of the finished product will be important to you. For example, if you have square artwork, you will be expecting your finished scarf to be square!
To get the printed fabric closer to the size you need, all fabric intended for scarves must go through an extra step to reshape it. Please allow extra time on your deadlines to allow for this process.
Let us introduce you to the …
The stenter is an enormous piece of machinery that has many uses, including coating our fabrics and reshaping scarf orders.
After travelling through a solution to soften the fabric, it then passes over a flat bed, gripped on the selvedge edges to pull it back into shape.
It’s a long and precise process that needs to be carefully monitored.
If you have selected to use our hemming service, we will check the stentered fabric for you before we begin to finish your scarves. If you are not using our service, it’s up to you to check the size BEFORE you cut out the individual scarves from the fabric length. We cannot re-size after your scarves have been cut out.
