Tiled Reverie Brings Taiwan’s Decorative Tile Heritage Into Fashion at London Design Festival

Tiled Reverie, presented during London Design Festival 2026, brought Taiwan’s decorative tile heritage into a contemporary dialogue between fashion and fine art. Created through a collaboration between Taiwanese fashion brand BOO and London-based Taiwanese artist Yung Hsuan Wang, known as Walkthecatt, the exhibition translated floral, geometric and auspicious tile motifs from architectural surfaces into original textile prints, artworks and wearable forms.

The starting point was a visual language widely found across Taiwan in the early twentieth century. Richly coloured decorative tiles appeared in homes and architectural spaces, combining ornament with symbolic meanings associated with prosperity, happiness and protection. In Tiled Reverie, those motifs are removed from their original fixed setting and considered through a different question: what happens when a symbol intended to inhabit a wall begins to move with the body?

From Architecture to Wearable Design

BOO approached this heritage through the print-led vocabulary that sits at the centre of the brand’s work. Traditional decorative references were reinterpreted through graphic lines, saturated colour combinations and contemporary silhouettes, shifting motifs associated with domestic and architectural environments into clothing.

Rather than reproducing historic tiles literally, the project considers how their visual codes can change when they pass from one medium to another. A pattern originally embedded within architecture becomes textile; an ornamental surface becomes something mobile and personal.

That transition also places cultural heritage in a different relationship with the wearer. The motifs are no longer encountered as part of a building or interior but become attached to movement, scale and the body, allowing familiar symbols to acquire another context without separating them entirely from their origins.

Art, Memory and Everyday Objects

Alongside BOO’s fashion pieces, Yung Hsuan Wang presented original artworks that extended the exhibition beyond clothing. The Taiwanese multidisciplinary artist, who is based in London, works across collage, watercolour, oil pastel and coloured pencil.

Her practice draws on everyday objects, dining-table scenes and elements of nature, using colour, texture and collage to examine relationships between people, objects and memory. Within Tiled Reverie, this interest in memory offers another route into the decorative tile tradition: not as a static historical reference, but as imagery capable of accumulating personal and cultural associations as it travels.

Wang’s work can be followed on Instagram at @walkthecatt.

BOO’s Print-Led Perspective

Founded in 2022 by Taiwanese designer Bao Wen Chen, BOO has developed its identity around colour, print and the reinterpretation of familiar visual material. Flowers, vintage imagery, memories and cultural references are collected and reconstructed through the brand’s graphic approach, with original textile prints forming a recurring part of its collections.

In Tiled Reverie, that methodology provides a natural framework for examining decorative tile culture. Instead of treating heritage as something that must remain unchanged, the exhibition places historic motifs within contemporary fashion and art, allowing their forms to be translated without losing sight of where they began.

The collaboration ultimately operates across several scales: from the architectural surface to the artwork, from textile print to garment, and from symbols rooted in Taiwan to an exhibition presented in London. Within the wider setting of London Design Festival, Tiled Reverie demonstrates how fashion can participate in conversations around cultural memory not simply by quoting the past, but by reconsidering how its visual language is encountered in the present.

BOO can be found on Instagram at @booofficial__.