Tait & Style on Gunnie Moberg

We are delighted that Ingrid Tait, founder of Orkney fashion-textile company Tait & Style, is coming to Stills to give a talk about her friend Gunnie Moberg and the groundbreaking fashion photography they created together on the Islands between 1990 - 2007.

Tait & Style, based in Orkney, is not a conventional fashion-textile company, and Ingrid knew that she didn’t want conventional fashion photography. Initial experimental shoots with Gunnie around the piers of Stromness produced original and striking imagery. Ingrid and Gunnie started working together regularly, with Gunnie reacting to Tait & Style’s colourful, quirky designs with photo concepts that combined artistic innovation with a genuine feeling for the landscape and people of Orkney. For seventeen years, till shortly before her death in 2007, Gunnie found ways to walk the line between art and commercial photography, and to create images that are still fresh and striking to this day. She also created best-selling knitwear: in the late 90s, she started designed and crocheting a range of scarves and hats for Tait & Style, based on techniques she had learned as a child in Sweden. A highlight of Gunnie’s crocheting career came in 1998, when ZZ Top bulk-ordered Moberg hats to wear on stage during their world tour. Gunnie crocheted these as she walked her dog along the beaches and cliffs of Orkney…a bizarre but entirely appropriate meeting of international style and local tradition.

Ingrid Tait is from Orkney. In 1989, after graduating from the Royal College of Art, Paul Smith and Liberty of London ordered her textile designs, and she established a studio-workshop in Stromness. Knitted and felted accessories were designed and made there, and sold in leading shops around the world under the Tait & Style label. There were also commissions for fashion houses including Comme des Garçons, John Rocha and Chanel.
In recent years Ingrid has run her family’s retail business in Kirkwall (www.olagoriejewellery.com) as well as teaching in art schools around the country, including the RCA. In 2006 The Lighthouse, Glasgow, held a retrospective of Ingrid’s work, and in 2010 she received a Jerwood Contemporary Makers Award.

This event has been generously supported by Highland Park Whisky.