Challenger of Tradition
For more than 200 years the porcelain manufacturer Royal Copenhagen has produced the exclusive Blue Fluted service. But a few years ago, a then-26-year old design student knocked at the old institution’s doors. She wanted to blow up the traditional design.
The coco-jug with the long spout was her favorite of the old Blue Fluted service. That and the rest of the white service with the small blue flower symbols were used only for special occasions in her parent’s home in Østerbro, Copenhagen. Her mother had inherited the exclusive service, which many Danes consider a part of the national heritage. As a child, Karen Kjældgård-Larsen loved it.
The now 31-year old designer smiles when talking about her childhood fascination with the old handicraft. She sits on a worn designer chair from the 1950s in the basement-workshop she runs with another ceramic artist. The chair and the crackling fire from the old iron oven in the middle of the room stand in contrast to the modern green ceramic vases that look like pieces of grass and the orange ceramic hats on display.
”We want to challenge tradition and make ceramics more modern and interesting,” Karen Kjældgård-Larsen explains.
This is exactly what she has done for the porcelain manufacturer Royal Copenhagen. Her new design for the Blue Fluted service led to a revival and more sales of the old design. She succeeded in making traditional porcelain trendy amongst the youth and her Blue Fluted Mega design is selling wildly in Japan, the U.S., Italy, the U.K. and Scandinavia. In fact, today Mega is the best-selling service from Royal Copenhagen.
As a child Karen Kjældgård-Larsen drew the old pattern everywhere. Her father once brought her to the factory to watch rows of ladies hand-drawing the blue flowers on plates, just as it had been done since 1775. At age 12 she contacted Royal Copenhagen for the first time to ask whether the company would consider producing some writing paper she had designed. But after receiving a “thank you – but no thank you” letter from the company, she forgot about the Blue Fluted pattern for years. She received her education at the Danish Design School, found interest in ceramics and completed one of her last student projects on decorations. Then she picked up the Blue Fluted pattern again and began to play.
She made drafts of plates where the pattern was found only on the underside. She painted Royal Copenhagen’s characteristic three waved stamp with a crown above- inside a plate and enlarged selected fragments of the decorations to a size about five times bigger than the traditional.
“It was fun because it was so provocative. It was shocking because everyone knew the old design and was very surprised by the new one,” Karen Kjældgård-Larsen recounts while taking a sip of coffee from her white Royal Copenhagen cup.
She presented the drafts at the exam table, and her teachers told her to show them to Royal Copenhagen. So she called the manufacturer from the school’s phone booth – mainly just for the fun of it. She never thought she would get anywhere with the new design. But she called at the right time. Royal Copenhagen was about to celebrate their 225th anniversary and were already looking for something to help them reinvent their old brand. After some negotiations with skeptical employees, a small collection of lunch plates with the enlarged pattern went into production under the name Blue Fluted Mega.
In the beginning Royal Copenhagen was chary with the new design. A few plates were on display in the Danish Museum of Art & Design and a small amount were for sale at the company store at Strøget. But suddenly some Japanese tourists discovered the plates and when a few royal ladies in waiting got interested, Royal Copenhagen took their plans a step further, asking. Karen Kjældgård-Larsen to design dinner plates. At that point, production began to pick up speed.
“It was amazing to walk around the factory and see fully-loaded wagons with Blue Fluted Mega plates. It was weird to see my design in such quantities,” she remembers.
The plates were popular in no time and Royal Copenhagen ordered designs for cups, bowls and teapots. And they are still ordering. One of the latest things Karen Kjældgård-Larsen has designed is a jug – not a coco jug with long spout as the one from her childhood – but a modern milk jug with the Blue Fluted Mega design.
May 2007