The Design Studio

Rachel Doriss—who joined the company as a designer under founder Mark Pollack in 2000—oversees the in-house design team and guides the creative vision for each textile collection.

The studio’s designers are, first and foremost, weavers. Each has a degree in textile design, having learned the architecture of cloth and how to build a fabric from the ground up. They are makers, and they are artists–they believe in the value of drawing with a pencil rather than a computer mouse. Besides the control it gives over the quality of the line, putting pencil to paper expresses a uniquely personal hand, and the majority of Pollack’s patterns begin as hand-drawn sketches. Additional design factors then come into play: color, texture, luster, fiber content, hand and scale. In the Pollack Studio, these individual elements are balanced and perfected, becoming the building blocks of a fabric’s structure–and reminding us that we experience fabric on many levels and with most of our senses.