Top: Working for Bates in the 1960s,
Trull also designed ready-to-wear
and men’s sportswear. Bottom: This
four-piece striped outfit, modeled
in a Colgate-Palmolive-sponsored
fashion show at the Four Seasons,
was made from slipcover fabric by
Charles Bloom. G
BEYOND SOLIDS AND STRIPES, LEN RAVEN, a family-owned
72
WBM september 2017
business founded in 1880 in
Alamance, North Carolina,
as a cotton mill, introduced
Sunbrella fabrics in 1961 for
awnings and later for boat
canvas. The popular water-repellent,
stain-resistant and
bleachable performance fab-ric
expanded to the outdoor
furniture market and eventually to interior design.
“You can actually have a white sofa or a white dining chair,
and if you do spill red wine on it you’re able to get it off quite
He designed two mens-wear
lines before going
back to home furnishings.
His dance card reads like
a who’s who of design and
fabric. He rattles off names:
a stint with the curtain and
drapery business Croscill/
Kahn, Fieldcrest Cannon,
Bates Bloomcraft, Larry
Kravet. Kravet Fabrics is
the biggest decorative job-ber
in America, he adds.
Luther Travis, Trull/Travis,
Sears of Canada, Spiegel,
Cameo Curtain Company,
Montgomery Ward.
Every endeavor benefit-ted
from his creative touch.
Tufted bedspreads were
common until Trull pushed
Bates Manufacturing to
make printed bedspreads.
“I was head of their
design department; I went
to Japan and did a whole
series of bedspreads on
those wide looms,” Trull
says.
He put printed designs
on corduroy jeans. He pio-neered
the trend of layering
pillows and shams across a
bed because he thought it
looked more luxurious.
“They let me do any-thing
I wanted because
everything I touched
turned to gold,” he says.
By the time he was 32 (1962), he had an apartment on Park
Avenue, complete with a live-in housekeeper and chauffeured lim-ousine.
He did a lot for House of Fraser, which owned most of
the major department stores in England except Harrods. He still
maintains an apartment in New York, at No. 60 Sutton Place South,
and a house in the Hamptons. Trull kept a London flat for 25 years,
finally giving it up two years ago.
He started a new design chapter in the late 1980s when his home
state’s Glen Raven Mills approached him to consult for the com-pany’s
Sunbrella fabric line.