Textured Memory, Textured Jewels: Illusions of the Mind

Texture is a garment for the mind and an atmosphere for the memory. It's enchanting drops of water when the rain starts sliding down the bus windows, when you need to travel across the city or thick cream on a cake, a remembrance of so many past pleasures that your mouth instantly starts watering when thinking of your next treat meal. 

Our memory associates those textures with various emotions that can energise us and contribute to an incredible mood boost. Texture provides visual and tactile sensations and memories, and immediately draws attention. If you choose a velvety dress, the cloth will give volume to your body shape with a subtle play on light. If you go for a duller fabric, the texture will flatten your curves and deviate smoothly from your body’s natural proportions. 

And that is what texture is all about: illusion. It gives you the opportunity to play around with style with freedom. You can create a balance or crush proportions into asymmetry to transform the most common shapes into a new product of your mind.  

Textures & Memory: A Close Relationship 

We are humans. We crave touch and exist in the world through nothing but our senses. As babies, we found comfort in the warmth of our mother’s arms and the smell of familiarity. As toddlers, when our mum would take us on a shopping spree, everything on this adventure would look bright and shiny. Little did we appreciate our mum and dad telling us off when we would reach for some glossy teapot or a little bag of colourful sweets, and the whole thing ending in a crisis right in the middle of the supermarket. 

Crisis days are over. You are now a grown person, completely able to enjoy the beauty of an object without touching it. In fact, in this world where artists are still sometimes regarded as aliens, most of us have been raised and conditioned to appreciate beauty without touching. Without feeling.   

Chances are, you still remember some of those bright childhood moments when you would be allowed to touch and feel. You might vaguely remember those shiny red shoes your mum got you as a young child. You might remember the pleasure of the flat shade when you were playing in the schoolyard on a hot May day. Textures are inviting and naturally blow in calm, comfort, and relaxation in the middle of stressful days. 

The Comfort of Texture 

With life experience, you can tell how you are going to feel even before touching something. But we think that the world should be touched. Texture should be felt to infuse movement into your days. Life is so unexpected always that any detail that can bring you comfort is essential. In the end, what you remember is always the feeling, and we are all about bringing a little bit of risk into our carefully organised lives.   

We are all attracted to the unknown. We would all love to drop everything for a couple of days (or weeks - or even months, sometimes!). We are humans, which means that by definition, we want what we cannot have, or the opposite of what we usually have. Has it ever happened to you that you wished to drink a frosty glass of lemonade in the middle of searing summer hotness? Or, when it is cold, all that you are thinking of is the fire crackling in the fireplace while you are all rolled up in a warm cosy blanket…  

Textures can make us feel absolutely at ease because they bring us the knowledge that we are attached to a known world. And comfort often helps us be more productive because no matter how far into society’s margins we want to disappear, we need to feel that we are not lost.