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East Hampton, N.Y. – Legendary textile designer, author and mentor Jack Lenor Larsen died peacefully on Dec. 22 of natural causes.
He passed away at LongHouse Reserve, the 16-acre garden and arts center that is his legacy. Larsen’s, companion of more than 30 years, Peter Olsen, was at his side.
A memorial service will be announced in the near future.
For those who wish to honor Larsen may contribute to the Jack Lenor Larsen Endowment Fund, established to support the maintenance of and programming at his beloved LongHouse Reserve.
His career as a textile designer began in the early 1950s when he founded his studio, Jack Lenor Larsen Inc., in New York City. His influence on midcentury modern design and textiles is distinguished by his passion for natural yarns, his appropriation and preservation of Asian, African, and indigenous patterns and techniques, and his aesthetic innovations. As recently as 2019, Larsen designed a textile collection in Sunbrella performance yarns, distributed internationally under Cowtan & Tout’s Larsen brand.
Larsen has been honored and recognized for his contributions to the fields of craft and design by leading arts and humanities organizations around the world. These include The American Craft Council, The American Institute of Architects, The Aspen Design Conference, The New School, Interior Design’s Hall of Fame and The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. He is the recipient of honorary doctorates from The Parsons School of Design, The Fashion Institute, The Rhode Island School of Design, and both the Royal College of Art and the Royal Society of Art in London, England.
Larsen is also one of only four Americans to have been honored with an exhibition at the Palais du Louvre in Paris as well as with a solo exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York in 2004. Larsen fabrics reside in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The Victoria & Albert Museum, to name just a few.
Over the course of his career, Larsen designed thousands of fabric patterns and textiles, and traveled widely and shared his distinctive techniques with others, resulting in the manufacture of iconic Larsen textiles in over 30 countries. In an era where artificial fibers and machine-made products were the latest thing, Larsen was known for handmade, natural materials and local craft traditions such as ikat and batik.
Among Larsen’s notable early commissions was the design of lobby draperies for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Lever House (1951-1952). Frank Lloyd Wright also used Larsen fabrics at both Taliesen and Fallingwater. Eero Saarinen commissioned Larsen fabrics for his J. Irwin Miller House, and Larsen was on the committee that selected architect Edward Larrabee Barnes for the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Other architect collaborators included Hugh Hardy, I. M. Pei, and Louis Kahn (whom he also taught to weave).
Larsen’s company created fabrics for Braniff Airways’ first jet planes and then PanAm’s first 747s, and other planes including Air Force One. His clients were global, sophisticated and diverse – they included Joan Baez, Leonard Bernstein, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Alexander Calder and Marilyn Monroe, among other artists and celebrities.
