Chainmail Decor Is Living in My Head Rent-Free

There’s something magical about chainmail when its shimmer catches your eye in a room. Back in 2022, we coined the term Middle Ages Modern after noticing the emergence of medieval aesthetics and the demand for wrought-iron objects, antique tapestries, and rich jewel-toned palettes surging. (Elizabeth Goodspeed, US editor at large of It’s Nice That, recently credited the resurgence of Future Medieval graphics as a trend that is “appealing to a generation fascinated by spirituality, mysticism and the supernatural.”) Since then, I’ve been quietly waiting and watching in the shadows for this renaissance to hard launch into the mainstream. And with the recent shift toward chrome, silver, and stainless-steel household staples, it feels like chainmail decor is finally up as the next big trend.

Blink and you might miss the chainmail curtain that backdrops Lil Baby’s primary bedroom inside his Atlanta bachelor pad. AD PRO Directory designer Annysa LaMantia was inspired to add this specific material to the space as a subtle nod to the rapper’s on-stage persona. “It’s not like a red drape that’s pulling back on a stage, but there’s drama there,” she says while pointing out that chainmail is a material that responds to the environment and creates an ongoing dialogue between the other objects around it. “You turn the lights on and [the curtain] starts moving visually, so I’m aware of that energy,” she explains. “If you were to slide it around, it’s going to move. It’s responding to the lighting that’s behind it that catches pieces at certain angles and makes it shine.”

My fascination with chainmail started with the 2021 debut of Panorammma’s Chainmail Chair, a divine creation made out of more than 3,000 metal rings that are hand-linked by local craftsmen in Mexico City. Serving as a take on William Katavolos’s 1952 T-chair, Maika Palazuelos “seeks to express and question our wish for constraint” through the piece. It was this tension that beckoned Tariq Dixon to carry the chair at the TRNK showroom. “It’s super eye-catching and you can’t help but notice it in a space, but there’s so many interesting layers to the product that I still find fascinating,” he says. “It’s just full of contradictions. The most common response to the product is there’s always an intrigue, but people are afraid to sit. They ask, ‘Can I sit in it?’ It’s like, ‘Well, yeah. It’s a chair, you can sit in it.’ There’s something that’s intriguing, but uninviting.”

Palazuelos is drawn to “versatility in materials and approaching them in different forms to see what we can make of and with them,” so she enjoys the endless possibilities that came from experimenting with chainmail. “You can use it as a textile, but it’s really solid and you can weld it to play around with the structure and create very intricate knittings,” she says. The Mexico City–based furniture designer’s productions fall somewhere between prop and utilitarian object, creating “a middle world where you are living with these objects, but they also introduce new ideas into your space.” For example, the Chainmail Droplet Lamp is meant to resemble spider webs. “They are meant to be a fantastical object, but they actually work and you can use them,” Palazuelos adds.

I came face to face with chainmail again last month at Collectible Fair when I spotted a booth shielded by drawable curtains that belonged to Erica Sellers and Jeremy Silberberg of Studio S II. The material became the perfect solution for a corner that didn’t have walls, acting as a translucent partition to section off their space. The design duo has repeated this move in residential projects for clients as a method for opening a floor plan, giving the suggestion of a separate space without completely closing it off.

“Chainmail is something that is alluring to us because it takes the concept of a curtain, which is historically soft, and makes it out of a hard material,” Silberberg explains. “So you get this duality—there’s a pleating effect that happens, which is soft, but when you touch it, it’s steel. I think that’s the coolest part about it.”

Silberberg and Sellers share an appreciation for taking things that are traditionally worn—like chainmail or latex—and bringing them into a different design discipline. “We’re starting to see people do love that duality, the severity meets comfort, and breaking up space in unique ways,” Sellers says.

Chainmail doesn’t exclusively belong to the indoors though. For the design of Kukje Gallery in Seoul, South Korea, Jing Liu and Florian Idenburg of SO-IL enveloped the entire building in a hand-fabricated chainmail veil. “It’s a little bit punk,” says Florian Idenburg, cofounder of SO-IL. “When you scale it up, it gets pretty raw in a certain way.” Since then, the AD100 firm has expanded into the category of “open furniture” that defies obvious use builds—the 2020 Frame Series builds off the idea of assembling and holding people together through steel mesh. (Many of SO-IL’s groundbreaking projects are featured in their forthcoming book, In Depth: Urban Domesticities Today.)

The bigger picture is that medieval aesthetics are trending. Chainmail has been a fixture in fashion as early as the 1930s when heritage brands like Hermès were producing chainmail coin purses and handbags. Remember Paco Rabanne’s iconic “1969” bag and his other dazzling designs? Or perhaps Zendaya showing up to the 2018 Met Gala dressed in Versace armor rings a bell? (In case you forgot, the theme was “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.”) I was delighted to encounter men shucking oysters with medieval looking gloves at a friend’s wedding earlier this year, but even more recently Chappell Roan served some medieval princess realness at the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards.

After spending hours pondering medieval relics, I was reminded of the eroticism I felt when I saw Elaine Cameron-Weir’s work for the first time at Art Basel last year: As I stared up at newly laid test route on which ruts are already worn, 2023 on the wall, I was struck by how a sculpture made out of stainless-steel rods and laboratory lattice connectors firmly pressed into wet-formed calf leather and an American silk parachute from the WWII era spoke to the subconscious desire to dismantle the invisible structures and social contracts that continue to plague us in a post-COVID world. Lisson Gallery describes this experience of subcultural worship as a “passage through a portal or beyond a threshold,” the same visceral reaction I have in the presence of chainmail.

Palazuelos appreciates how chainmail has given her an opportunity to engage in a new dialogue that considers the context of Mexico’s medieval period, which she views as a very romantic age based on the wave of poets, philosophers, and artists that emerged. “We all know chainmail from these medieval stories and fairy tales and that automatically opens up the possibility of [the work] being a fantastical object,” she explains. “Mexico had a very short medieval time, but it is a very interesting part of our history where there were a lot of cultural activations primarily by women.”

Over the past few months, Georgia Somary of Earl Grey Studio has been making prototypes for a chainmail series of objects like aluminum table lamps that feature hand-mailled steel chainmail bases. (She also recently installed a chainmail fireplace screen in the home of a high-profile client.) “There was a joy for me with material in it being both so practical, so impractical, and so impossible to make work with lighting,” she explains. “With that lamp, it was a handmade piece of chainmail that is steel, so it weighs a lot. It’s heavy and uncomfortable to lift. But I really like how light looks through it and actually there’s such a softness and diffusion to the light when it’s refracted that many times and it glints off the other pieces of mail as well.”

The Los Angeles–based interior designer proposes that her natural attraction to the material might be influenced by her past life as a set decorator in the UK. During that time, she was trained in an armory to make swords for film, restore antique weapons, and even dress horses in armor. In the present, Somary’s references usually come from the pages of books filled with antique ironwork, filigree jewelry, and early Byzantine art like Early Christian & Byzantine Art: A&I and Early Christian and Byzantine Art. She is also inspired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Arms and Armor Galleries and the Getty Museum.

Despite having references that are “hundreds of years old,” Somary can envision chainmail popping in more contemporary spaces featuring bulkier furniture like “a squishy couch, a beautiful, heavy wooden coffee table, [and] lovely lacquered pieces.” She views it as a fun and unexpected material that can be used “very much as a kind of whisper in a space,” acting as the perfect footnote. “It’s warmer than people think it is—there’s such a soft, warm light that you even have when it’s filtered through,” Somary adds. “I think it’s a difficult thing to want to invite in, but when you do, it’s worth it.”

For Loney Abrams and Johnny Stanish of Wretched Flowers, brutal medieval armor was their main source of inspiration for the design of their Chainmail Floor Lamp and Chainmail Pendant, the latest additions to their series of “hard objects for the uncommon home.” The creative couple is lured in by historical craftsmanship, metalwork, and folk art traditions, following a formula that typically involves mixing something “really brutal, masculine, and even dangerous” with a reference that is sweet and domestic. “It’s never about trying to create a new form, it’s always about how to be more of a DJ—to pick and choose different references and elements from design history and mix and match them in a way that says something new,” says Abrams.

With chainmail in particular, they both appreciate how versatile and flexible it is in its application; Abrams likes to think of how the material hugs objects and bodies the same way. “It can drape like a fabric but reads like an object,” she says. “It’s soft and hard, and it’s transparent but very architectural, at the same time.” Wretched Flowers is always mindful of working with materials that carry a violent history, carefully considering their references and finding subversive ways to remove that context. For example, their latest masterpiece is a chainmail curtain with crochet-inspired beading that reads as a quilted textile and can be used as a window dressing or wall tapestry. “Having architectural blinds doesn’t give that soft, flowy, gauzy look,” Abrams adds. “This chainmail curtain filters the light really beautifully, but also gives this starker structure to it too.”

Medieval aesthetics have a tendency to scare people off because of their appearance in spaces that aren’t particularly warm, but Somary believes there’s room for the genre to be recontextualized through subtle uses. Sellers and Silberberg achieved a balance for a contemporary home by layering it with antiques exclusively from the Renaissance Revival or Gothic or Medieval periods. “It’s a conversation between all those pieces,” Silberberg adds. Like any design process, it’s all about exploring unfamiliar territories and expanding on new ideas.

Abrams points out how chainmail has the ability to give a space more structure without dominating it because you can still see through it. “It can work as a room divider, a screen, a curtain, or a wall piece,” she explains. Dixon stresses that this material is “best in small moments,” noting how it has a strong presence and makes a statement (as seen inside Vin Ho’s fashionable bachelor pad designed by Darren Jett). “It’s porous, almost translucent, and transparent,” he says. “It doesn’t feel heavy or bulky, but at the same time has presence and structure… I think it can accomplish a lot in a room.”

Idenburg continues to be fascinated by the application of chainmail to furniture, citing the Paulistano armchair, designed in 1957 by Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Roch, as a prime example of its timeless essence. “What is available is very standard, and it is made for those markets, so you’re very quickly limited to this very fine grain,” he explains. “It’s not very common to find the material. You can’t buy it, you actually have to go and make it.” Somary also acknowledges that there is an “inaccessible accessibility” to the material, but thinks this is “a really exciting place to be where there’s not a ton of it and you are able to feel your way around a little bit.”

Similar to how Lil Baby never leaves his house without a chain dangling around his neck, chainmail is like a statement jewelry piece for a room. Within the context of a floor-to-ceiling curtain on a track system installed to break up the space, it evokes a feeling of elation and lightweightedness. Of course, there’s a fine line when playing with chains in our interiors—if you go too far your space could wind up looking like a dungeon (and not in the fun, sexy way that some people desire).

“People are sick of minimalism,” Abrams concludes. “They want maximalism, but they don’t want this brightly colored, hot pink maximalism. I think people are like, ‘How do we make something look really rich and layered, but not like you’re in some kind of fun zone? How do you make it sophisticated?’ Chainmail is such a good solution to that.”

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