Badlands

Badlands is comprised of four rugs, each meant to evoke the view from the window of a car speeding through the prairies of the Midwest towards the Badlands of Montana.

We designed this collection in the earliest stages of finding out we were going to be new parents, and we are now releasing it weeks before the birth of our daughter. Perhaps we were thinking of childhood and fairy tales, which Badlands certainly resembles in all its innocent violence. Or it could be that Terence Malick’s 1973 classic is a film we’ve turned to again and again for inspiration (this isn’t the first collection we’ve named after it - in a former Cold Picnic life there was a collection of Badlands handbags and jewelry).

As with many of the films which inspire our designs, the Badlands landscape is as soulful and actualized a character as any of the humans on screen - maybe even more so. The colors are all rich and vivid, if seemingly capped by a layer of dust. There’s a story the lead actor Martin Sheen told GQ about carefully washing his hair in preparation for his first scene, only to have Malick grab a handful of dirt and rub it throughout to “take the shine away”. The film Badlands embodies this casual vibrance.

Photography: Jonathan Hökklo