This is how Neisha Crosland, now one of the UK’s leading print and pattern designers, got her big break in the late Eighties. If it started off as a rebellious upstart, Osborne & Little has now long been part of the establishment, but Osborne still enjoys nurturing new talent, visiting the main graduate shows to seek out designs to buy. “I actually prefer it, now it’s more cleaned-up, and with all the restaurants,” confides Osborne. Osborne & Little was initially surrounded by antique dealers that have all fallen away. The shop is still there now, one of only a handful of retailers to have survived huge change in the area, from swinging fashion boutiques such as Mary Quant to the birth of punk fashion via Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s World’s End shop, and on to the immaculately well-heeled place it is today. Osborne & Little opened a showroom on London’s King’s Road in 1970, and by the middle of the decade they started producing fabrics, too (textiles now account for more than three quarters of the business). Antony was the design side and I was the business side, but there was quite a lot of overlap between the two of us.” I wanted to do something more exciting and entrepreneurial.
All my friends were becoming stockbrokers and bankers, and I did the obligatory year in the City and absolutely hated it. “Actually, I was at rather more of a loose end than him. “We were both 25, both at a bit of a loose end,” says Osborne, about why the pair decided to team up. I wanted to do something more exciting and entrepreneurial." "All my friends were becoming stockbrokers and bankers, and I did the obligatory year in the City and absolutely hated it. Before setting up Osborne & Little, he had been working as a graphic designer and was also responsible for the fluid, art-nouveau-inspired logo of Biba. It’s also a good example of Antony Little’s ability to reference the design movements of the past and bring them up to date. “That really was our studio style – strong, and characterised by hard edges,” says Osborne of the early designs, and of Wilde Carnation in particular. In the present day it comes in a more soothing neutral, as well as a zingy grey and lime green version, and has become as much of a well-loved design classic as a William Morris. Wilde Carnation is a version of a classic Ottoman design, a repeated pattern of stylised palmettes, but its oversized motif and brain-shuddering colours such as sage green on tomato red made it quite different to its heritage inspiration. Not every design from 1968 is quite so way-out: the very first one to roll off the production line is still available to buy today, in fact. That’s when we plunged in and did all this really exciting stuff.” At the time, the alternatives were Lincrusta, William Morris… all very nice, but it needed something younger and zippier.
“There was a gaping hole for somebody to supply some exciting, quirky wallpaper.
Osborne calls it “porridge” – textured papers in oatmeal-sludge colours. Leaping tigers and psychedelic carpets are all the more surprising when you consider what else was on the market in 1968. Now celebrating 50 years in business, he still helms the company (co-founder Antony Little, Osborne’s brother-in-law and the creator of those first designs, retired in 2002). “I’m not saying you could sell it nowadays it was definitely of its time,” says Sir Peter Osborne, the co-founder, who is also the father of former chancellor George Osborne. With their freedom from convention and pop-art aesthetic, they perfectly encapsulate the era: it’s easy to see how they would have provided a backdrop for the other equally exuberant designs of the late Sixties, from bubble chairs to violent-coloured shaggy carpets. One design, Speed & Fury, features pink and orange tigers, leaping through mint-green hoops, on a gold-foil background another, Jonas Cord, is like a simplified tapestry or carpet design, but in a vibrant red, purple and blue, that creates a strobing effect on the eyes. But there’s no benchmark for boldness quite like decorating company Osborne & Little’s early collections, first launched in 1968. Statement-making wallpaper comes and goes in fashion – and it’s definitely having an “in” moment right now.
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