Ikea teams up with Katie Eary

Menswear designer Katie Eary has teamed up with Ikea on a limited edition collection of affordable soft furnishings and dinnerware.

The Giltig collaboration showcases Eary’s fish, cat an eyeball prints on the retailer’s home furnishings, as part the Swedish brand’s fashion-forward exclusive collections for 2016. The Eary collection launches in April and includes tableware and home textiles that the retailer states will “turn up the volume at any party”.

The collaboration is part of Ikea’s first partnership with a number of fashion designers, including the British menswear designer, as the homewares retailer looks to respond to current trends and fuse influences to give its customers “cutting-edge design at affordable prices”.

"A decade or so ago, you could get an idea about who a person was from their cd's or books. Now it seems that, as far as the home goes, furniture and personal bits and pieces are the last things left that show your identity," explains Katie Eary. ”I've learned loads through working with IKEA - it's great to see my designs in a totally different context. There's so much you can do within home furnishing and so many boundaries to break still."

Ikea’s creative leader, Henrik Most added: "We can learn a lot from how fashion designers work with colours, prints, patterns and shapes. They constantly have to re-invent themselves and what they do - and are used to working in the forefront of pattern and colour development.”

Alongside Eary’s collaboration, Ikea is also working with fashion designer Walter Van Beirendonck and Swedish textiles designer Martin Bergstrom. Van Beirendonck’s line of ready-to-cut fabrics, stationery, rugs, and ceramics will launch in June showcasing the designer’s playfulness and avant-garde flair, while Bergstrom’s collection of bed linens, textiles, paper products, rugs, bowls, glassware and metal objects created using just black, white and shades of grey will hit stores in September.

Images: Katie Eary for Ikea