Inca Tailor
Mitchell Owens, World of Interiors
September 2025
Years before starring in the 2017 Venice Biennale and decades before gaining fame for her colourful fibre sculptures, each more grandiose and befuddling than the last, a young artist named Sheila Hicks waited patiently for a meeting with Florence Knoll Bassett. The latter was a Modernist architect and designer who oversaw Knoll Associates, then located at 320 Park Avenue in New York. The former was living and working in Taxco el Viejo, with her beekeeper first husband, but about to flee to France, to the man who would become her second. It was 1964, and Hicks – who had travelled from Mexico to Manhattan – wore a simple homemade suit that could have been donned by Jacqueline Kennedy: a jewel-neck jacket closed via three dark buttons with a pleated skirt to match. […]