Front Row
Reformation Wants You to Stand on Its Swans: The Label’s First Rugs Land
The LA fashion label has teamed up with French rugmaker Les Éditions de Tapis on nine hand-knotted designs. Shoppers had been asking for them for years.
Reformation shoppers have spent years doing something slightly unusual in a clothing store: looking at the floor and asking where they could buy it. The label has finally answered with the Reformation rug collection, its first step into home, made with French rugmaker Les Éditions de Tapis.
The rugs were never a secret. Les Éditions de Tapis is the company behind the ones already underfoot in Reformation’s stores, and Chief Creative Officer Lauren Caris Cohan says she has worked with the brand for years to bring a little whimsy to the retail experience. Customers, she says, have been asking about those rugs for almost as long.
Nine rugs, two accents
Cohan designed the collection with Thomas Coccimiglio, founder of Les Éditions de Tapis. It comes to nine limited-edition designs, each made to order, and the brief was to blend Parisian luxury with LA nonchalance. That is a lot to ask of a rectangle of wool, but the pictures make a decent case.
There is the Swan Fan Rug in French Blue: a light blue field with clipped corners and two stylised swans, their wings fanned out in black and orange, facing each other in perfect symmetry. There is a circular Swan Fan in ivory, a single embroidered swan with a fan-like tail on a beige ground (it comes in an 8-foot size). There is a Chintz Rug in baby blue, grey and pink, which reads like your grandmother’s best sofa fabric after a very good week in Los Angeles. Elsewhere in the line you will find palm trees and antique-style borders.
Each design starts as a hand drawing and is then hand-knotted by artisans in India and Nepal, using natural fibres including wool, linen and silk. Prices run from $1,000 to $5,000, and the rugs are sold exclusively online through Reformation’s website. Made to order, and made to last, is how the brand puts it.
How a rug romance begins
The partnership has been years in the making, and it began with an introduction. Festen Architecture, the Parisian firm that designed Reformation’s Soho flagship in 2023, put Cohan and Coccimiglio in touch. The rugs went into the shop, people noticed, and the question kept coming back at the till and in the inbox: can we have one?
That origin story is the quiet strength of the project. Plenty of fashion names have wandered into homeware by slapping a logo on a candle and calling it a lifestyle. Reformation did it the other way round. The product existed, the audience had already fallen for it, and the collection simply opens the door that customers had been leaning on. Homes & Gardens, for one, notes that the leap from fashion to flooring might look random, yet it feels as natural as any of the label’s other collaborations.
Azure Magazine points to how Reformation works with collaborators: creative autonomy matters, and the real work lies in choosing partners who are aligned from the start. Here that meant a rugmaker whose pieces had already been living in the brand’s spaces. Nobody had to be convinced of the fit, because the fit was on the shop floor.
Why the floor makes sense
A rug is a smart place for a clothing label to begin. It is the largest canvas in a room, it carries pattern the way a good dress does, and it rewards the same instincts: a feel for colour, a sense of humour, a love of an unexpected motif. A swan with fan wings is, when you think about it, a statement print that happens to be woven. Homes & Gardens goes further and says the line makes the floor more of a focal point than it has ever been.
There is also something satisfying about a fashion brand choosing slow, handmade craft for its first home product. A drawn design, a knotting process and a made-to-order timeline sit at the opposite end from fast-moving wardrobe drops, and they suit a brand that has long been associated with sustainability.
The campaign was shot in a home, which tells you where Reformation sees these pieces living: not in a showroom, but in rooms where people eat toast and drop their bags. For the label’s customers, who already know the look, the swans and chintz will feel less like a new direction than a familiar friend arriving in a larger size.
