Obsessing Over Alexander Skarsgård's 'Wicker' Man? Get to Know These 5 Design Studios Already Weaving Basketry Magic Into the Everyday
As we wait for Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson's romantic fantasy comedy film to be released, meet the creatives sculpting whole worlds out of natural fibers
From a larger-than-life, feral Viking prince in The Northman to a self-hacking, part-human, part-machine Security Unit ridden with cynicism and anxiety in ongoing Apple TV+ sci-fi comedy-action series The Murderbot, Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård isn’t new to morphing into the most eccentric, weird, and physically demanding of characters. With Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson's forthcoming romantic fantasy comedy film Wicker, which is scheduled to land on the big screen this autumn, Skarsgård, who has been acting since the age of seven but reached global stardom as vampire Eric Northman in hit HBO show True Blood, might have just outdone himself. Or so thinks the internet.
Debuting in the UK this October 30, Wicker follows the unexpected life turn that sees an ostracized, single fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) living in a rigid, gossiping medieval seaside village go from laughingstock to envied talk of the town after asking a local basketmaker (Peter Dinklage) to fashion her a husband out of wicker. In a rather Nosferatu twist — funny that Skarsgård's brother, Bill, was the latest actor to bring the iconic creature to life in Robert Eggers' 2024 movie remake — the resulting wicker man is not just a sentient being, but a loving, passionate, even extraordinary partner to the woman. She is once again preyed upon by the community. This time, though, out of jealousy, as her companion's imposing silhouette causes shock, lust, and pure frenzy among residents.
While even we at Livingetc are excited to see what Skarsgård's wicker man will look and feel like, there is more to the whimsical film we can't wait to dive into. A clue comes from its title, Wicker — an ancestral weaving technique that's enjoying fresh popularity within the ongoing UK craft revival and beyond.
Oscar-winning actress Olivia Colman as The Fisherwoman in Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson's anticipated romantic fantasy comedy film Wicker.
Peter Dinklage as the mastermind Basket Weaver behind the fisherwoman's out-of-the-ordinary husband, the Wicker Man. The costume was crafted with a 30lb suit of wicker affixed to a 3D-printed shell of Skarsgård's body, artist Lily Stockman revealed.
To be precise, the staggering protagonist Fischer and Wilson envisioned appears to have been molded from lacquered bamboo-like strips rather than willow or rush, two of the most widely used materials for traditional basketmaking in England, where the film is set, and the rest of Europe. This didn't escape former T: The New York Times Style Magazine editor-in-chief-turned-basket-maker Deborah Needleman, who took Instagram to point it out, initially suspecting the costume was CGI.
Still, reassurance was not long in coming: "Fischer and Wilson worked closely with NZ-based Wētā Workshop (who did a lot of Lord of the Rings costumes) to create a 30lb suit of wicker affixed to a 3D-printed shell of Skarsgård's body, with only minimal digital effects around his eyes. It's legit, baby," artist Lily Stockman wrote under the post.
An explanation for the factually inaccurate yet functional choice of weave came from self-professed absurdist basketmaker, artist, and curator Lewis Prosser, who runs his own studio in Wales: "he's definitely a braided basket, woven on the diagonal rather than being stake and strand," Prosser explained, adding that, requiring loads of interlocking frame baskets, willow would have been a more challenging material, and the result likely "a bit clunky". With Wicker, the directors hit an awkward middle ground between it being "rustic and unrefined but also defined enough to show human emotion". Emotion also runs through the striking wicker productions of these emerging design studios worldwide.
Chris Wolston
Designer Chris Wolston standing next to his Carabobo Amphora 1, one of the pieces featured in Profile in Ecstasy at Dallas Contemporary, earlier this year. The show, which closed February 1, was his debut museum exhibition.
Split between Brooklyn and Medellín, Providence-born designer and artist Chris Wolston's practice grew out of his 2009 Rhode Island School of Design training and crystallized in 2018, when he reached for rattan to soften the edges of an anodized-aluminium wardrobe. He never put it down. In Medellín, he works with a profit-sharing collective of local weavers, using rattan sourced from the Colombian Amazon to build his signature Nalgona chairs — hulking, limbed seats he describes as "a human form embracing a human form".
The results have since traveled to Fendi, Dior, and Qatar's Culture Pass, and have become some of the most fantastical pieces in the ever-expanding collection of residential gallery The Future Perfect's founder, David Alhadeff, who regularly styles them in his LA home, New York, and Miami locations, as well as presenting solo and group exhibitions of his work.
Wolston's Nalgona chair series turns rattan into anthropomorphic seating — chairs with arms, hips, and a wink of pre-Columbian sculpture.
Profile in Ecstasy, Wolston's debut solo museum exhibition, opened November 7, 2025 to February 1, 2026 at Dallas Contemporary, retraced ten years of the designer's work across four catwalk-shaped platforms that gave the display a fashion show look. Highlights included The Grace Jones Fountain, a cast-aluminum piece echoing the singer's iconic pose on the cover of the Island Life album, Wolston's signature wicker and rattan chairs, giving human limbs an unexpected, functional twist, and a series of voluminous terracotta thrones directly inspired by pre-Columbian pottery traditions.
Sagarminaga Atelier's Gabriela Sagarminaga Roldán
Sagarminaga Atelier's New Nature collection, shown at Salón Nude, wove esparto, reed, and metal over timber frames.
Based in Bilbao, Sagarminaga Atelier was founded in 2017 by Gabriela de Sagarminaga after a Medialab-Prado residency in Madrid, held on the site of an old esparto field, sent her down a rabbit hole into the grass's history and craft. She's stayed there since, pairing esparto and other vegetable fibers with numerically cut digital tooling to produce sculptural panels, headboards, room dividers, and full ceiling treatments — objects built, as she puts it, to "have something behind them".
Beyond sculpture, the studio designs entire interiors: ceilings and wall coverings spun from esparto, rattan, wicker, and chestnut fiber.
We first came across her totemic, animal-inspired work while previewing 3daysofdesign 2025, where she led Fragment of the Fish, a hands-on workshop letting attendees weave their own amulet beneath her floating sculpture Tuna ExMachina. Most recently, she partnered with Belgian wallcovering brand Arte on its Milan Design Week 2026 debut, translating imagined scenes from ancient Memphis into life-sized, monochrome reliefs woven from raffia, cork, shells, and grasses that made our festival's highlights list.
Lørdag & Søndag's Salvador and Enzo Compañ
Each Lørdag & Søndag Artefacto bears the mark of its origin — from Oaxacan basket-weavers to volcanic-rock carvers working by hand in Puebla.
Founded in Mexico City in 2011 by brothers Salvador and Enzo Compañ, who grew up on an island in Campeche surrounded by their architect father's sketches, Lørdag & Søndag builds what it calls "artefactos": sculptural objects made in tandem with master artisans across Oaxaca, Chiapas, Veracruz, Guerrero, and beyond.
Fiber weaving sits alongside volcanic stone-carving and woodwork in the studio's toolkit, each piece carrying the visible fingerprint of the region and hands that made it.
Their woven wicker-fiber lamps and wall sculptures channel reinterpret pre-Columbian forms and traditions through a distinctly contemporary lens.
This summer, that practice went on the road: as artists-in-residence at Rosewood's Las Ventanas al Paraíso in Los Cabos, the Compañ brothers installed their Artefactos throughout the resort and led guided sunset walks through the collection, while textile artist Daniela Chiñas — a longtime collaborator known for the studio's fiber pieces — ran Mixteco Knot Workshops teaching guests to weave their own fans and baskets, culminating in an "artifact dinner" built around the sculptures' own forms.
The Wicker Story's Priyanka Narula
The Bark Jhula hanging seat from The Wicker Story's Whispers of the Wildwood collection features an organic, fluid loop design in gradient woven tones.
Architect Priyanka Narula founded The Wicker Story in Hyderabad in 2019, after a master's in parametric design and robotic manufacturing collided with the reality that such technology was scarce, and pricey, back home in India. Instead, she set out on a journey to translate digital, algorithmic design logic into cane and rattan, weaving it entirely by hand. The result is a zero-waste practice spanning sculptural furniture, cane fabrications, and vast site-specific installations that stretch a village craft to architectural scale.
The Pagdandi Unit by The Wicker Story is a contemporary, fluid shelving installation featuring intricate handwoven cane and rattan forms supported by a metal frame.
Her latest immersive spatial and woven exhibition, Where Space Performs, unveiled at India Design ID 2026, pushes that ambition further still, demonstrating how "form, light, and scale interact to transform craft into a living, tactile spatial experience". For Narula, wicker might be an ancient technique, but not a static one. Her production seeks to continuously redefine natural fibers' potential, stretching them into the most disparate directions, as well as transferring their malleable quality to other materials, including metal, in an attempt to rewrite the rules of mineral craftsmanship, too. Stay tuned.
Mestiz's Daniel Valero
For Auberge Resorts' Etéreo and Chileno Bay properties, Mestiz wove its "Las Flores del Mar" lamps and sculptures in palettes drawn from each coastline.
Architect and designer Daniel Valero launched Mestiz in San Miguel de Allende in 2015 as an "alter ego" for merging craftsmanship, design, and art. The studio pairs wicker with wood, ceramics, and wool in an explosively colorful, zoomorphic language, built through long-running partnerships with local artisans who work with "the same tools they have always used".
Valero's wicker cactus lamps, dyed in hot pink, sum up Mestiz's color-drenched, zoomorphic take on traditional weaving.
We saw that world out in full force at sketch's 2025 art and design exhibition, ¡hola, London!, this past September, where Valero's El Charco installation — wicker cacti, crocodile-shaped shelves, dragons — turned the restaurant's hallways into what felt like a fever dream you didn't want to wake up from while walking through it.
Among his most notable projects is Las Flores del Mar, a multi-destination installation of flora-inspired wicker lamps and sculptural pieces Valero created specifically for the Auberge Resorts Collection. It landed across three of its Mexican properties — Etéreo (Riviera Maya), Chileno Bay Resort & Residences (Los Cabos), and Susurros del Corazón (Punta Mita) — last year, adding an extravagant touch to each address. For the designer, the creations are complementary: "they speak their own language, but when they are together, it's a whole conversation."
Take That 'Wicker' Magic Home
Get ready for Wicker to land with our curated edit of natural fiber tableware, accessories, and homeware.
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