What Raf Simons Took from the Shakers

Late October is when a house starts to fill up. Coats come back from the cellar, scarves and hats reappear by the door, and the blankets that spent the summer folded in a cupboard return to the sofa. None of these things is large, but together they change a room. The question of where to put them, which seemed trivial in July, quietly becomes a question about how one wants to live.

The Shakers had an unusually clear answer. Their full name was the United Society of Believers in the Second Coming of Christ, a religious community whose founder, Ann Lee, crossed from England to New York with a small group of followers in 1774. Over the following century the Shakers built villages across New England and beyond, and became known as much for their buildings and furniture as for their faith. That furniture was shaped, in the words of the US National Park Service, by order, utility and durability. Each piece was made for a particular purpose and a particular place in the room.

The most characteristic element of a Shaker interior was not a piece of furniture at all. It was the peg rail, a strip of wood fixed along the wall with turned pegs at regular intervals. In many rooms it ran along all four walls, and on it hung whatever the room needed: garments, hats, baskets, and the chairs themselves. A curator at Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts has explained that chairs were lifted onto the pegs so the floor beneath could be cleaned, and that they were often hung upside down so that dust would not settle on the seat. The result was a room that could be emptied in a minute. The floor stayed clear, and the walls carried the life of the house in plain view. This journal has followed a related idea before, in the story of a chair designed to hang on the wall.

Raf Simons came to the Shakers by a less obvious route. Born in Belgium in 1968, Simons studied industrial and furniture design in Genk and worked briefly as a furniture designer before turning to fashion and launching a menswear label in 1995. He went on to lead the studios of Jil Sander, Dior and Calvin Klein, and in 2020 became co-creative director of Prada. His collaboration with Kvadrat, the Danish textile company founded in Ebeltoft in 1968 by Poul Byriel and Erling Rasmussen, was first shown in January 2014 with a collection of upholstery fabrics. Kvadrat means square in Danish, the basic unit of any woven cloth.

In August 2022 the collaboration moved from fabrics into the home itself. While living in the United States, Simons had become interested in Shaker culture, and the new range was built around a single object taken from it. The Shaker System is a horizontal bar of powder-coated aluminium, upholstered in Vidar, a dense Kvadrat wool with a quiet satin surface. The bar has no visible pegs. Its hangers are concealed, so that the things suspended from it seem to float just below the line of the bar. Simons was also thinking of the American sculptor John McCracken, whose monochrome planks leaned against gallery walls, and the bar has something of that quality: a single block of colour, sculptural in its proportions, that reads as an object even when nothing hangs from it. The idea, as Simons put it at the launch, was to think about a whole house, room by room.

What hangs from the bar is mostly wool. The Lambswool Throw is light and soft, finished with a whipstitch edge in a contrasting tone, and carries a small label that Simons found in the Kvadrat archive: the company's original mark from the 1960s. Folded over the bar it becomes part of the wall; taken down in the evening it becomes a blanket again. The arrangement suits the season. In winter a throw is used every day, and a place where it can hang in full view, rather than be stuffed into a basket, gives it the status of an object instead of a household chore.

The heavier throws borrow their construction from tailoring. A double-faced cloth is woven so that it has two right sides and no wrong side, which is why coats made from it can be left unlined: the inside is as finished as the outside. The Double Face Wool Throw uses this to place a different colour on each face, and closes the edge with a coat hem rather than a blanket stitch, with a border printed in running type. Its cashmere counterpart is finished with dried thistles, an old method for raising the surface of woollen cloth. For centuries cloth workers drew the hooked seed heads of the fuller's teasel across the fabric to lift its fibres, first by hand in wooden frames and later on revolving drums, until metal cards largely replaced them in the twentieth century. On the throw the thistles leave a slightly rippled surface that looks made by hand. Kvadrat describes it simply: a throw made like a coat.

Not everything on the bar is soft. The Leather Mirror Tray is a rectangular mirror set in a box frame clad in leather and lined underneath with Vidar wool. Hung from a leather strap it is a mirror by the door; laid on a table and turned over, it becomes a tray for keys and coins. It is a very Shaker idea, an object with two uses and no ornament, and it explains why the system was planned around the rooms of a house rather than around a list of products. The hallway, the living room and the bedroom each receive their own small set of things, and the bar holds them all in the same way.

The campaign that introduced the system was photographed on the Swedish island of Gotland, in rooms furnished with work by the Swedish designer Axel Einar Hjorth and with mid-century pieces from Simons's own collection. The images are spare almost to the point of austerity: a whitewashed wall, a rough bench, a single bar with two or three things hanging from it. They show what the Shakers understood about domestic order. It is less a matter of owning few things than of giving each thing a visible place, so that a room can hold a full winter's worth of wool and still look calm.

The peg rail was never meant to be admired. It was a tool, fixed to the wall so that a community could keep its rooms clean and its belongings within reach. Some two centuries later it has become a reference for a fashion designer and a Danish textile company, made in aluminium and wool and hung at a height of about 160 centimetres. The principle has hardly changed. A room in winter is easier to live in when the things it needs are hung where they can be seen.

Images: Courtesy of Kvadrat/Raf Simons