This Charming Quilt Collaboration Will Bring Winter Cheer to Your Wishlist

The British womenswear label Whistles—known to occasionally appear on a Middleton sister (or two) across the pond—recently arrived in New York; and to celebrate its first standalone, stateside store, creative director Nick Passmore has engaged Phoebe Sung and Peter Buer of Cold Picnic to create a limited-edition, reversible cotton quilt. “We have been exploring ways to evolve the Whistles [brand] to include more lifestyle products,” Passmore says, and Sung and Buer’s charming, Brooklyn-based line of rugs, bath mats, and throws has attracted something of a cult following. “What really resonated with me was their brand ethos, and intelligent sense of design,” Passmore says. Working with the pair, she says, “has been a delight from start to finish.”

Born in Brighton, along the southern coast of England, Buer was already well-acquainted with the Whistles aesthetic when he and Sung were approached with the project earlier this year. To him, the Whistles brand conjures a “fun yet grown-up use of color and silhouettes, which is something we also aspire to.” There was already a sentimental twang to their work at Cold Picnic, with its emphasis on the artisanal and handmade; but for Buer especially, collaborating with Whistles made that sense of reaching backward even more real. “Cold Picnic feels like a very American brand, even though I’m English,” he says, “so it was a fun challenge to design something from a more British perspective, and think back to growing up in England.”

Just in Time for Winter, Cold Picnic Has Collaborated with Whistles on a Limited Edition, Mod-Inspired Quilt

The look of the quilt was conceived as a riff on the English landscape, with one side (that with the grey background) inspired by life in London, and the other (the one with the large pink and yellow shapes), referencing the pastoral countryside. Its color palette, muted but lively, was developed by Whistles, and comprised a nice balance of tones (mustard, pebble, navy, blush), some of which were familiar to Buer and Sung in their textile work; others of which were unusual. “So while we had a comfortable place to start,” Sung says, “we weren’t comfortable enough to get complacent. [We] still had to be thoughtful about how we used the colors.”

Similarly graphic and collage-like in their compositions, the two resulting patterns drew partly from late-20th-century British pop culture. “We rewatched some old British films like Far from the Madding Crowd—the Julie Christie version—and [the 1965 film] Darling; also Tom Jones and Quadrophenia,” Sung says. The visual language of mod was everywhere—in the big hair, the bold colors, the tailored silhouettes—and Buer and Sung embraced it in their design scheme. “There is a definite sense of nostalgia in our work,” Buer says, and with the Whistles quilt, that “was especially the case.”

The Whistles x Cold Picnic quilt is available in select Whistles stores in the United Kingdom, United States, and Hong Kong, and online.