Pia Wallén’s Flacons Collection Brings Felt Designer’s Vision to Glass and Ceramic

Pia Wallén, the Stockholm-based designer best known for her work in felt, presented Flacons, a collection of glass and ceramic objects, at NK in Stockholm earlier this year.

The collection marks a continued expansion of her practice beyond the textile-based work that built her reputation, with particular attention to glazes and braided forms drawn from craft history and personal memory.

Pia wallen flacons collection

Wallén’s design language moves between tradition and modernity, a duality that has defined her output since the 1990s, when she made her international breakthrough with bold, minimalist felt objects including the Crux blanket and her unisex slippers. Those pieces, rooted in traditional Swedish folk craft techniques and patterns, became modern classics for their combination of graphic simplicity and contemporary edge.

With Flacons, Wallén carries that same sensibility into glass and ceramic, treating the new materials as a continuation of the formal investigation that has run through her felt, metal, leather, and plastic collections. The photography accompanying the collection, presented at Pia Wallén Atelier in Stockholm, was shot by Frederik Lieberath.

Wallén was born in Umeå and studied fashion design at Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm in the mid-1980s. Her work is held in the permanent collections of Sweden’s National museum, the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg, and the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Cologne, and has been shown at venues including the Centre Pompidou and the V&A.

She has further engagements planned for the year, including a jewelry project in Paris in May and an exhibition at Blå Hallen in Höganäs in July, alongside continued development of new garments from her personal textile archive and further work in glass and ceramic.

Pia wallen flacons collection red