In June 1988, founders Mark Pollack, Rick Sullivan and Susan Sullivan, all alumni of Jack Lenor Larsen, launched their new venture Pollack & Associates with a memorable collection of 22 textile designs targeted to the high-end contract interiors market.  Since 1988 the line has flourished and expanded into the residential and hospitality markets, as a more decorative aesthetic was combined with the company’s solid technical foundation.  Today, the wide ranging collection is celebrated for fabrics that easily cross the lines of these individual segments, fabrics marked by sophisticated design, intricate construction, nuanced color palettes and timeless elegance.

Nowadays Pollack continues to thrive under the creative leadership of Rachel Doriss, VP and Design Director.  The collection boasts over 500 patterns, as classics mingle with new designs that are brought to market with enviable consistency.

The company merged operations with Weitzner Limited, a highly regarded wallcovering company known for its innovative designs in 2011.  With a worldwide following, Pollack continues as a privately held boutique company and currently employs approximately 70 people in its New York City headquarters and showroom and its Jersey City, NJ warehouse.

Pollack approaches textile design from various perspectives, all equally valuable. Inspiration might come from a particular yarn that we want to showcase, a new manufacturing technique or process, a weave structure that we develop on a handloom, a market need. It may even start with a pattern, though, contrary to popular belief, this is not always where a fabric begins.

Notable amongst the distinctive Pollack collections are:

Pollack’s On the Fringe collection contains a group of five Indoor + Outdoor fabrics, designed as a collaboration between the Pollack Studio and the acclaimed UK design company A Rum Fellow, where partners Caroline Lindsell and Dylan O’Shea celebrate the heritage of Mayan craft techniques in the hand-woven textiles they bring to market. Our fabrics share the vibrant colors and graphics of these traditional designs, while infusing them with the durability and versatility that our modern lifestyle calls for. The balance of the collection offers an eclectic menu of fabrics that range from the namesake On the Fringe, a complex, fashion-inspired layering of lustrous embroidery and over-the-top fringe, to the material richness and sophistication of our PURE group. Bundles of Joy touts the finest of weaving skills and Off the Grid combines a modernist color sensibility with the most basic structure of weaving. Four existing patterns get an infusion of new colorways, and our window offerings expand with five innovative designs.

Inspired by couture fashion, where more is never enough, On the Fringe combines a hand-woven ground embellished with machine embroidery and appliquéd strips of hand-woven linen, fringed in two alternating colors.  Yarn, stitch, surface, luster, dimension and movement all play their part in crafting the exuberant animation of this extraordinary design.

Etiquette is a riff on a traditional houndstooth design with a satin weave and the extremely fine, high-density nylon warp craft its reflective surface.  Cat’s Meow weighs in with the requisite amount of feline style, drama and mystique.  Hand-drawn and abstracted, the iconic leopard spots are polished with two earthy colors of viscose pile, raised above a voided cotton striae ground.  The glamorous Modern Dance poses a slick, burnished ground against bold, angled blocks of heavy viscose chenille that weave in a widely-spaced checkerboard.  Off the Grid is a modernist textile design that paints, cell by cell, an exciting linear canvas of pure, saturated color. Impeccable tailoring and crisp graphics describe Riveting.  Its understated, softly heathered cotton ground fields a grid of pristine squares, mapped out by lustrous circles of a heavy polyester yarn. In Shape Up, architectural precision defines the angular forms of a minimalist design.  A world of geometric shapes is drawn as a fine line of filament polyester etches the cotton ground. Coastline is patterned with finely stratified lines, meandering and soft-edged, that stream across its double-width.  With an effortless grace, this window fabric offers a translucent veil of gently combed color. Precise embroidery stitches fill in opaque triangles on Tri Out’s sheer double-width ground.  Changing direction every other row, the angular motifs, as dimensional as cut-outs, are aligned within a rigid grid to form a luminous geometric screen.  Thin, crinkled ribbons stripe Ticker Tape Parade, creating a checkerboard design as they flow from straight lines into lengths of pinched lozenges.  Produced by a couture mill in Italy, the fabric’s cotton and polyester yarns weave through a much finer nylon warp, with the contrast of the yarn sizes creating the gently rippled surface. Celebrating the art of weaving, Bundles of Joy demonstrates the intricate beauty that an inspired combination of yarn and structure can produce.  Two layers of fabric weave and interlock to create a textured, detailed checkerboard that indulges in the pure materiality of several gutsy yarns.

Website: www.pollackassociates.com