Sheila Hicks Revisits the Fabric That Started It All
Catherine Hong, Lila Allen, Alia Akkam, and Maya Ibbitson, Architectural Digest
October 2025
To fully appreciate Altiplano, the wool-and-nylon weave recently released by Knoll Textiles, you need to take it apart. So says Sheila Hicks, the acclaimed fiber artist responsible for its design. To do so is to put yourself in Hicks’s shoes in the 1950s, when the now-nonagenarian was exploring the textile traditions of the Andes for her undergraduate thesis at Yale. “I happened to stumble across [the traditional fabric] when I was walking with my backpack in the highlands of Peru,” says Hicks, who just opening a show of new work at SFMOMA in August. “I was fascinated not only by how it looked, but how it was being made.”