NEW YORK, New York —Karim Rashid, the designer of home furnishings for the mass market has unveiled his Globalove fabric collection licensed by Arben Textile, Moscow, the large  Russian fabric wholesaler showing at Heimtextil stand 4.1 E91.

Rashid has done other fabric collections in the past 30 years including one for C&C Milano, a high end editeur. With Globalove, Rashid says he is pushing the boundary for the unusual and for the very original designs in his collection.

Rashid met Archie Tchernov, one of the owners of Arben, on a plane trip back from Milan after Proposte and by the time the plane had landed in New York, the deal was all but signed, as Rashid tells it. 

“I wanted to sleep. But Archie was so incredibly passionate about changing the Russian landscape that all I could do was listen to him,” Rashid recalls. That trip covered his first assignment for Tchernov which was the design of MOD, a design center in Moscow that has since opened successfully with many high end home furnishings tenants.

Next, the Globalove Collection was created. “The older Russian population was traditional but my collection is for the new Russian generation and is highly contemporary,” Rashid explains. “There are a lot of Italian showrooms now in Moscow. Everything there is going contemporary in design,” he adds.

The new collection consists of 120 designs in five to six colorways. It includes new printing techniques, both transfer, wet and digital as well as a woven jacquard in nylon and viscose.

Everything is priced for the mass market in the middle price range. “Globalove is designed for people who like progressive design but can’t afford it,” Rashid says. He continues to push companies to design for the mass market and do more products which people can afford; good design should not become a tool for the elite. Design should be for the betterment of society, Rashid feels. “I want to get things in the hands of the majority.”

Today, Rashid is working on 117 projects. His studio employs 15 people in New York and five in Amsterdam. He travels nonstop worldwide almost continuously but it looks as though he will be slowing down some because he is expecting his first baby!