“All we can do is be nostalgic,” says fabric designer Tania Vartan, who recently created a series of five fanciful jackets from her line of punchy interior textiles.

Known for fabrics covered in trompe l’oeil malachite and marble, a riff on rattan, painterly irises, and clouds that might have emerged from an ancient Japanese block print, Vartan traces her nostalgia (and thus her inspiration) to the literary greats of the late 19th century through the 1930s. She adores the great Russians (Tolstoy for one) who chronicled the imperial families of Czarist rule. She praises the writing of English aristocrat Lord Berners, which traces a class of writers who swanned around together through two wars and terrible economic crashes.

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