above: photos taken at Future Icons Selects exhibition, London Craft Week 2024
Lighting with a millinery heritage
Just as architecture and interior decoration have long been a source of inspiration for her hat designs, Karen Henriksen’s range of sculptural lightshades draws on her millinery expertise and distinctive design ethos. Constructed from layers of translucent banana-fibre, each piece is completely hand-stitched, with draping, folding and pleating techniques applied to create a lyrical, abstract asymmetry and a playful elegance.
Banana-fibre (also known as sinamay) is widely used in the millinery industry. It is made by independent weavers and small family co-ops in the Phillipines, who work directly with millinery suppliers, also small family businesses, here in the UK.
Selected pieces are available to buy online here.
Karen is also happy to collaborate and work to commission, whether you are a private client or an interior designer. Please feel free to get in touch if you’d like to discuss commissioning a customised or bespoke piece for your home or interior project.
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Background and Inspiration
For inspiration, Karen has drawn on her couture millinery archive (see some examples below) - where sinamay, silk, or paper, wraps, drapes and folds around itself, or blooms cloud-like from wearers’ heads. Alongside this is an abiding interest in contrasting textures and surfaces in furniture, interior design and architecture. And of course, the natural world is a constant source of inspiration, in particular, abstracted botanical and floral elements.
This lovely quote by Lucia van der Post back in 2011 has an interesting prescience…
“look out for Karen Henriksen, who does for hats what Ingo Maurer does for lights -
that is, make them look light, diaphanous and as if they’re floating. She uses ultra-fine straw to make hats that are quite strange yet beautiful and flattering.”