If you’ve ever sidled up to a floral display, keen to subtly feel its leaves and grasp whether it’s real or not, you will appreciate how lifelike the new breed of artificial flowers has become.
They are no longer the “obscene mockery” that John Updike once described. Perceptions have changed hugely thanks to a new coterie of artisans working to dispel the image of dusty, sun-bleached blooms on your granny’s sideboard.
Ett Hem London is only a year old, but already has customers such as The Royal Opera House and Kensington Palace, who have thousands of its incredibly lifelike flowers on display. The brand was conceived during lockdown, when Elle King, a designer for John Lewis, received several bunches of fresh flowers for her birthday in March “that arrived in varying states of decay, or died quickly afterwards”.
Along with her friend and co-founder Sarah Radovich, King took a year to find exactly the right combination of suppliers to craft the flowers they wanted, and the business started trading in April last year. “The idea was to make them feel as premium as possible,” she says.
The fact that they are in the royal household (along with many stylish homes on Instagram) is, King admits, “surreal, but incredibly affirming that our flowers are in such important places”.
They’re not alone: luxury faux flowers are having a moment. Patrick Oude Groeniger founded the luxe artificial flower business Silk-ka in the 1980s (a former florist, he developed a pollen allergy). His latest collection was recently on display at the Maison & Objet design fair in Paris and is lauded by interior designers. When he was starting out, he says, “people found it interesting” but still preferred fresh flowers. Today he sells “millions of flowers a year”.
Their realism is praised by high-end clients. In Paris, Diederick de Jongh, founder of Flora Magnifica, counts many of the fashion houses in Paris, including Chanel and Dior, among his clients, as well as private individuals, many of whom live near his shop on the Rue des Tournelles and pop in to top up their collection. The appeal of fleurs artificielles is their ability to bring “the beauty of nature into your home” for clients who are “people who travel a lot,” he says. “Constantly having to take care of fresh flowers is troublesome for them. They want to come back home to the apartment and the flowers just to be there — looking alive.”
Sue Jones, co-founder and creative director of homewares shop Oka, agrees that this is a huge part of the appeal of its range of faux flowers and plants. It was introduced in 2000 but sales have risen by nearly 20 per cent in the past 12 months, including a range of extra-large faux olive trees (each costing £2,995) selling out twice in that time.
“I think the pure simplicity of being able to bring nature into the home without the care and mess that usually comes with real plants is the true appeal of faux, not to mention the certainty that your plant won’t die in a few months,” she says.
It’s not just the haunting thought of the waste of a dead plant that is driving people towards fake; it’s all the packaging that comes with fresh flowers, too. The floristry industry has just had its main annual selling event, Valentine’s Day, when an estimated 250mn stems of flowers are sold globally, according to the British Florist Association, most wrapped in single-use plastic to protect delicate buds.
King wants to emphasise the environmental perks of faux flowers, despite the fact they are mainly made from a polyester fabric. “They last a lifetime,” she says, “so you buy once rather than weekly.”
There’s nothing new about our desire to capture a flower for eternity: Ancient Egyptians made flower and foliage shapes with slivers of horn, while the Romans created flower replicas from wax. But silk flowers date back to women of the Imperial Palace of China, who wore them in their hair. In the 12th century, Italian merchants started making silk flowers, a skill picked up by French artisans, who quickly became the European masters of the trade. (There is an apocryphal tale that Marie Antoinette, after being presented with a silk rose, fainted at the sight of it.)
After migrants fleeing the French Revolution brought the craft to England, its popularity took hold during the Victorian mania for everything floral. At its peak, the 1891 census reported 4,011 flower-makers in London. “Silk was the preferred material to emulate the delicate petals, with which skilled crafts people were successfully able to recreate realistic-looking flowers which could last years,” says Danielle Patten, director of creative programmes and collections at the Museum of the Home in London.
Realism today relies on returning to high-quality materials, hand painting leaves and including the irregularities of nature. While de Jongh says that real flowers “are starting to look artificial; because they are boxed up and shipped around the world, they are grown to fit a crate, and they have lost their spirit”, the high-end faux embrace nature’s imperfections.
Abigail Ahern and her sister Gemma, a trained florist, sell faux flowers in her Islington, London, homewares store, as well as online and, since December, in Crate & Barrel’s New York flagship store in the Flatiron district, where they sold out in the first week.
The key to lifelike flowers, says Ahern, is “taking individual flowers and foliage that we love directly to the factories to be replicated. We use weeds and thistles, sometimes plants we’ve literally found at the side of a road. We like to celebrate the unsung heroes of the floristry world.”
Ahern sells her botanicals in single stems, with a guide online about how to arrange them. It is this artistry of display that de Jongh agrees is essential when displaying faux: “You have to breathe life into artificial flowers,” he says. Part of that is treating the flowers less as a static bouquet and more like an ever-changing “collection that you can play with over the year, then put away and come back to later, adding to them as you like”.
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