Karen Moller grew up in a small town in the mountains of Western Canada. At the age of 20, after graduating fr om art college in Calgary, she hitchhiked to San Francisco with a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road under her arm. Disappointed that the Beatnik world was a male fraternity with women sideline to the fringe she took off to Paris attending art classes and sitting around Café Flore. As an artist in training she lived out the hottest moments of the 60s/70s, first as an existentialist and hanging out with the little known but soon to be famous art, theatre and poetry avant-garde in New York, Paris and London. After a year in Spain wh ere she began designing clothes, textiles and furniture for the undeveloped Spanish market she headed for London. Karen seems to have lived it all – but was no mere observer. She counted many creative people among my friends and their bouncing of each other’s energy helped create Swinging London, where the Pop and Rock world, London’s intelligentsia and art world partied together. She took part in the feminist, sexual and political protests and helped man/woman the Paris barricades in 1968. Those free and easy economical years of the 1960s allowed her with little cash and no family help, to create her own hippie boutique. The young were quick to shed their dowdy post-war clothes for the multicolored hippie outfits that filled her boutique. You would not have been surprised to see her on the set of Medium Cool as one of those Carnaby Street and Kings Road designers.
In 1969 she established the first textile design studio in London, which made her fortune and her international reputation. After winning awards and her international reputation established she moved her design studio to Paris. In 1985 with Li Edelkoort she opened Trend Union, a fashion consulting and design office, which worked with many of the worlds most important designers. It was cited by Time Magazine as one of the world’s best fashion forecasting services. Karen has written several books and now splits her time between her townhouse in Paris and apartment in Venice. In 2018 her memoir Technicolour Dreamin’ in her own fashion was published in England. Chasing the Stars and Hoping to Shag the Moon, is now on the bookshelves. (a follow up on those years in dialogue with her friend Cy of 60 years). If this second book is about books—it is far fr om bookish! The passionate dialogue of these kindred spirits ranges across the fashion and literary art world, wh ere tantalizing footsteps of their own are traceable across these pages. Indeed the boundaries between real life and the life of fiction are often blurred and unless you read closely you may not know which landscape you are currently strolling in with them.