Exclusive: Textile Artist Caroline Hélain on Her Collaboration with Longchamp

French textile artist Caroline Hélain creates abstract compositions of landscapes with sprawling fields, rolling hills, calm waters, and bright blue skies. With an intuitive understanding of colour, depth and texture, she portrays the natural world by layering and assembling hand-cut fabrics. Hélain draws inspiration from her own experience in nature; the “ever-changing” seascapes, in particular, leave a lasting impression on her.

“I’ve been sailing for 15 years,” she says, describing her journeys along the French coast. “At first, there is only the sea. When you start approaching land by boat, you can see more and more of the island, then slowly, you can finally make out the shape of the coast. Against the crashing waves, you notice the texture and colour of the cliffs.”

In this exclusive interview, BAZAAR speaks to Caroline Hélain about her collaboration with Longchamp.

For Longchamp, Hélain dives into her childhood memories of “escaping into nature”, crafting nine exclusive landscapes to be transposed on a capsule collection of leather goods, knitwear, and scarves. The creative process began with the composition and colour palette. “There was one specific hue with a fluorescent touch that created a luminous contrast,” she says.

From there, there were deep conversations about the placement of the landscapes and how to adapt them to the shape of each piece. Hélain’s early foray into textile arts involved “drawing with a needle” with embroidery and handsewn dolls, before discovering that she enjoyed cutting directly onto fabric and using the appliqué technique. This background helped her consider that her artwork will be transposed on a three-dimensional canvas.

“My collaboration with Longchamp has given me, for the first time, the opportunity to extend the landscapes I create onto the scale of the body. The idea that my horizons can follow the move, enveloping the entire silhouette, feels deeply meaningful to me,” says Hélain.

“The part of the beauty [in this collaboration] is that every detail is determined down to where each stitch will be located and the amount of space between them,” she enthuses. The challenge of working with different materials, such as leather, canvas, cotton, and bouclé virgin wool, did not faze Hélain. “In fact, we made the landscapes immersive on the silk scarves and cashmere squares. It will be different every time you put it on, depending on how you put it on or tie it,” she says.