December 7, 2022 Giovanna Dunmall Claudy Jongstra: 2022 Interior Design Hall of Fame Inductee Dissatisfaction with working in the fashion industry was a major career catalyst for Dutch textile designer and artist Claudy Jongstra. Visiting a 1994 exhibition at the TextielMuseum in Tilburg, Jongstra was bowled over by a traditional nomadic yurt. “It was literally a house made of felted wool,” she says, still sounding excited so many years later. She quit her fashion job, got work cleaning offices in the evenings and, locked up in her Amsterdam atelier, devoted herself “to finding out everything possible about this material.” Two years later she showed the results of her labors to the curator of that exhibition. “She immediately purchased four pieces for the museum collection,” Jongstra says. “That’s when I thought, Okay then, this is really the path I have to go down.” So Jongstra spent the rest of the decade creating innovative felted materials that spanned the categories of art, craft, and fashion. John Galliano, Donna Karan, and Christian Lacroix used them in their clothing designs, and the Jedi knights in Star Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace wore coats made of her felt. What she had loved about fashion as a little girl, whose mother made the family’s wardrobe out of “beautiful fabrics,” and as a young woman studying fashion design at the Utrecht School of the Arts, was the freedom it provided. “By making your own clothes, you develop your own identity and individuality, and it gives you a feeling of independence.”

The founder of Studio Claudy Jongstra in front of her monumental sculptural installation Woven Skin, 2017, at the Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden, Netherlands. Photography by Monique Shaw. In 2001, wanting to work on large-scale pieces and control all stages of the production process, including growing her own wool, cultivating plants for natural dyes, and following sustainable artisanal practices, Jongstra moved her business to rural Friesland in the northern Netherlands. There, she not only set up a design studio and atelier—and began earning public commissions from such heavyweight firms as Deborah Berke Partners, Gensler, Reddymade, and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects—but also established a flock of Drenthe Heath sheep, an ancient breed that lives on heathland, “maintaining it in a very natural way,” she explains. “Their quiet life is reflected in the quality of the wool—it’s shiny and has long fibers, you can see it’s healthy and vital.” The same could be said for the plants Jongstra and her team grow for dyeing the wool and other fibers she then felts. Frustrated by the toxic pesticides and chemicals used in commercial vegetable-based pigments, which also cause variations in color quality, she created her own biodynamic botanical garden to propagate heritage plants. Over the years she has recreated ancient recipes for many hues, including centuries-old Burgundian black—a warm, complex shade incorporating walnut, indigo, woad, and madder root dyes—which was showcased in Viktor & Rolf’s 2019 haute-couture felted-wool collection. She has also revived a distinctive red Rembrandt used, which is made from madder root. “It takes three years to grow and two to dry before it’s ready,” she says. “But it’s worth the wait because you get a top-quality product.”

In Jongstra’s studio, a palette of carded, naturally dyed fibers, ready for use in an art­work. Photography courtesy of Studio Claudy Jongstra.