Before It Was Called Teddy

Few objects stay with a person as long as a soft toy bear. It is often among the first things a child is given and among the last things an adult will throw away, worn thin at the ears and mended more than once. That it exists at all is owed to two quite separate events in 1902, one in the American South and one in a small town in Württemberg, which a trade fair in Leipzig brought together a year later.

On 14 November 1902 Theodore Roosevelt was hunting near Onward, Mississippi, at the invitation of the state's governor, Andrew Longino. The party, led by the guide Holt Collier, had found no bear for the President, so his attendants cornered an American black bear and tied it to a willow tree for him to shoot. Roosevelt refused, judging it unsportsmanlike. Two days later The Washington Post printed a cartoon by Clifford Berryman, Drawing the Line in Mississippi. In later versions Berryman drew the bear smaller and more endearing, and in New York the shopkeepers Morris and Rose Michtom made a small stuffed cub, placed it in their window and labelled it Teddy's bear.

The other half of the story begins in Giengen an der Brenz. Margarete Steiff was born there in 1847 and contracted polio as a small child, which left her legs paralysed. She trained as a seamstress and bought, with money saved from giving zither lessons, what is said to have been the first sewing machine in the town. Late in 1879 she came across a pattern for a small elephant and sewed it in felt as a pincushion. It became the first success of what grew into a toy factory. Her nephew Richard Steiff joined the business in 1897, and in 1902 he designed a bear with movable arms and legs, catalogued as 55 PB. The German Patent and Trade Mark Office describes it as the first plush bear of its kind.

In March 1903 Steiff showed the bear at the Leipzig toy fair. Hermann Berg, a buyer for the New York firm George Borgfeldt & Company, ordered 3,000 of them for the United States, where the bear catalogued as 55 PB would meet the name from the cartoon. In 1904 another nephew, Franz Steiff, designed a button in the ear as the firm's trademark, so that its work could be told apart from cheaper imitations. In 1907 the factory produced 973,999 bears. Margarete Steiff died in Giengen two years later.

Those early bears wore mohair, the long, lustrous hair of the Angora goat, in a tawny shade close to the real animal. The bear that Kvadrat/Raf Simons has made with Steiff wears something else. Asator is a cotton velvet Simons developed for Kvadrat, a dense, short pile velour with a matt surface and deep, saturated colour. Kvadrat's technical sheet gives its composition as pure combed cotton and its weave as a V binding, the construction in which each tuft of pile is held by a single weft thread. Velvet has a long association with silk, ceremony and formal rooms, and Simons has been clear about wanting to leave that behind. In his own words, quoted by Kvadrat, he chose to make a velvet purely from cotton, freed from its noble connotations. On a bear whose name came from a story about a president, the plainer cloth seems right.

The Asator Velvet Teddy Bear is made by hand in Germany. It carries the Steiff button in its ear and the words Kvadrat Raf Simons embroidered on one foot. Kvadrat notes that each bear has its own slightly different character. The colour, called Desert Sand, is a warm caramel brown, nearer to the old mohair than to the bright plush of later decades.

The bear belongs to the Kids collection, which Kvadrat/Raf Simons introduced in autumn 2025. It grew out of the Shaker System, the wool-clad rail Simons based on the peg rails of the American Shakers, whose story this journal followed in A Peg Rail, a Blanket and Raf Simons. For children the rail comes in vermillion red, and around it Simons placed wool blankets, one woven in jacquard with a bear and a rabbit, hooded towels, cotton bucket hats, a wool storage bag and a cushion in the same Asator velvet as the bear. Little in the range is scaled down into cuteness. Several of the materials, the towelling among them, are the same ones Kvadrat uses for adults, and the forms stay plain.

I like the idea that the child can think and also have what their mum or dad have.

Raf Simons

The campaign, photographed by Casper Sejersen against a pale grey backdrop, takes him at his word. Children hide under blankets thrown over a small table and pour tea for a bear on a red wool throw. None of it is staged as a nursery. A throw, as Simons has put it, can be a blanket or a plaything, and the pictures leave the decision to the child.

Steiff's first bears were sewn from natural fibres by a firm that cared enough about its work to mark it with a button. The Asator bear keeps both habits and changes only the cloth. Its velvet will flatten where it is held most, at the paws and behind the head, and the button will stay where Franz Steiff put it in 1904.

Most children who are given a bear will never hear of Onward, Mississippi, or of a seamstress in Giengen who sewed elephants as pincushions. They do not need to. The name came from a refusal and the toy from a sewing table, and both were long ago absorbed into something simpler: a companion that is carried everywhere, put to bed, left out in the rain and kept.

Images: Courtesy of Kvadrat/Raf Simons. Campaign photography: Casper Sejersen. Cartoon: Clifford K. Berryman, 1902, Library of Congress.