Undone, Unresolved, Untouched: Where Textile Design Is Thriving.
On emotional dressing, the handmade, and why fashion is ready for the unfinished
In a time of algorithm-driven visual culture and AI-generated imagery flooding every surface, textile design has embraced the counter-culture. Artisan, eclectic, undone, unfinished and atmospheric. Textile as emotional language. The handmade mark, a nostalgic comfort and the drive to capture glimpses of fleeting beauty in the ever-changing moment of nature: water ripples, clouds passing, the way sunlight hits. Artists capture it. That moment of pure seeing, colour, light, beauty, before it slips away. Untouched World is a collection of those moments, ready for the moment they meet a body.
The soft-focus moment
The motif matters less than the atmosphere it creates.
Trend forecasters have been tracking the rise of blurred and soft-focus printing for SS27. Prints with diffused edges, hazy gradients, and a quality of gentle indistinction that reads as simultaneously nostalgic and forward-looking. The idea, as one SS27 forecast put it, is that prints are becoming "emotional storytelling tools" rather than decorative surfaces.
Untouched World was created purely in the studio, with paint and paper. My authentic response to fashion, culture, nature and capturing beauty and light in fleeting moments. In the studio, when I paint, it's organic, unorganised and purely from the mood that takes me. When digitised, this is where the fun begins for me: the incredible tools to distort, blur, layer and recolour, bringing atmosphere to the textile print. It's a process that gives the work a quality of found rather than invented. The motifs feel discovered, not designed.
What nature-inspired means now
The most resonant framing in SS27 trend research is this: nature is no longer a backdrop for fashion. It's a collaborator.
That's a meaningful shift. Backdrop nature gives you palm prints and hibiscus. Collaborator nature gives you something stranger and more specific. The quality of light through leaves, the particular blue of water at dusk, the way a flower looks when it's just past its peak. Not the postcard. The experience.
This is where Untouched World lives. Prints made by someone who looks very closely at things and renders not what she saw but how it felt to see it. Textile as emotional dressing, the garment as a place to put feeling that has nowhere else to go.
Colour as feeling
The SS27 colour story is unusually unified across multiple forecasting sources. There's deep agreement on a palette that balances what one report called "live hues, colours that feel emotionally resonant rather than simply on-trend" with cooler, more ethereal tones. Deep teal and vibrant turquoise. Soft lilac and peach. Terracotta as the grounding neutral. Meadow green as the nature-forward anchor of the season.
These are not clean, bright colours. They're colours with depth and complexity, colours that carry history. The kind of palette that reads differently at different times of day, that rewards looking.
Untouched World sits squarely within this. The indigo and burnt sienna of Feather Glass. The sage and cream of Greenhouse Plaid. The coral heat of Heat Wave balanced against Mineral Wash, light bouncing off water, caught for just a moment before it shifts. These aren't trend colours applied to prints. They're the colours that emerged from the work itself.
The hybrid print: where structure meets the organic
One of the most commercially interesting moves in current print direction is the collision of geometric structure with organic, painterly motifs. Plaid grounds with botanical overlays. Grid structures interrupted by blooms. The controlled made strange by the natural.
Greenhouse Plaid and Etched Garden are both working in this territory. And then there is Washed Grid, which carries the mark of the hand entirely, imperfect, crafted, like something pulled from an old process and made new. Structure as craft rather than geometry.
The industry is saying it too
Dries Van Noten Men's SS27 showed cloudscape washes dissolving across tailoring, colour bleeding into the garment until the two became inseparable. Atmospheric, painterly, the print not decorating the cloth but becoming it. Alongside acid yellow trousers and blotchy, abstract pieces that hold the bold and the ethereal in the same breath. It's the same tension Untouched World is working in.
At Dior Men's, Jonathan Anderson put it plainly. "I like the idea of something unresolved."
Ulla Johnson captures the fleeting moments, “They have this incredible sense of movement. Our woman is definitely on the go. I’m never thinking of someone static and posing, but about how she’s feeling, and elaborate travel stories, and that feeds the inspiration so much.”
Something unresolved. The motif that hasn't quite declared itself. The colour that sits between names. The bloom that is still becoming. This is not a trend direction. It's a philosophy. And it's arriving at the highest levels of the industry at exactly this moment.
In closing
The counter-culture moment in fashion is here. Not loud, not protest, but quiet and deliberate. The choice of the handmade over the generated, the atmospheric over the defined, the felt over the finished. Untouched World sits inside that choice. If your collection does too, reach out.
Josephine Lorelle is a textile and surface pattern designer based in Auckland, New Zealand. Her work is available for buy-out and licensing enquiries through Josephine Lorelle Design Studio.
