Liberty London has been trading on heritage since Arthur Liberty founded the business in 1875, importing silk and textiles from Asia and the Middle East before becoming bound up with the Arts and Crafts movement and William Morris. Its archive holds an estimated 50,000-plus print designs — nobody knows the exact figure, because patterns have been continually recoloured, resized and revived rather than filed away. Pentagram’s packaging for the fragrance line LBTY. treats that archive as working material rather than a museum case, which is the difference between heritage as a velvet rope and heritage as a velvet coffin.

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