As a lover of all things vintage and archival, there are few things that excite me more than a project that plumbs the historical trove of a company or design movement and resurfaces its forgotten gems; it’s the same thrill I get shopping a flea market or antique mall and discovering something incredible that had previously gone unnoticed or been cast aside. It really makes me sad to think that, even as a design editor who manages to see so much, 30 times that amount will always remain in the shadows. Which is why I felt a pang of envy when I saw the launch earlier this month of Torch, for which TON magazine editor and interior designer Jermaine Gallacher got to help pull a collection of rugs and textiles out of a ’90s time capsule and reimagine it for contemporary use. Originally titled Elements and Beyond, the celestial-themed series was the work of the seminal textile designer Christine Van Der Hurd, who celebrated 50 years in the business last year, and who spent 18 months working with Gallacher to revisit and refine her original vision.

Van Der Hurd started her career in London in 1973, when right out of art school she began selling her textile designs to the likes of Liberty of London, Etro, and Yves Saint Laurent. Just a few years later she moved to New York, added rug commissions for architects and interiors to her repertoire, and founded the studio and gallery Modern Age, through which she and her business partner repped emerging furniture talents like Tom Dixon and Ron Arad. While her list of collaborators in those years was long, the colorful Elements and Beyond collection was hers alone — an eight-rug homage to astrology, 17th-century Athanasius Kircher illustrations, and the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, which she collaged snippets of into one of the rug designs. They were joined by very ‘90s motifs like suns, moons, flames, and spirals.

When Gallacher and Van Der Hurd decided to collaborate in 2023, they combed her back-catalogue for potential starting points, and the series emerged for both of them as the obvious choice. Through the rugs, says Van Der Hurd, “it was as if our design languages, though developed decades apart, were speaking to one another.” Anyone familiar with Gallacher’s predilection for that decade’s formal language — albeit a darker, more gothic take on it — would agree; he worked with Van Der Hurd to distill the original pieces into more simple recurring patterns, not only sprinkling them across rugs and cushions, but embroidering them onto stools of his own design. The pair named the reboot Torch, to recognize its works as new entities, and have now made them available to purchase for prices ranging from $450 for a cushion to $7,900 for a rug. Preview the series here, including two amazing archival images of Van Der Hurd with the rugs that inspired it, shown directly below.

Above: Archival images of the original Elements of Beyond collection