The Fabric of Time and Space
Melina Copass’ Designs bring the 1950s into the 21^st Century

By Chris Jepsen
Googie Architecture Online, 1998 

So, you’re refurbishing a classic Googie coffee shop and need the perfect upholstery for the booths. You can spend half your life combing antique shops or you can call Melina Copass. If you’re lucky, the antique shops may produce a few random bolts of moth-eaten fabric. Copass will supply you with all the quality Space Age barkcloth patterns you’ll ever need.

Copass, a San Francisco designer, is the founder and owner of Melinamade Fabrics, which reproduces 1950s atomic and geometric motifs on barkcloth cotton. All her designs are screen-printed by hand using pigment color inks. In addition to selling fabric by the yard, she re-upholsters furniture, designs home decor items, and does her own marketing.

I first discovered Copass via the web, but I didn’t appreciate the full impact of her designs until I saw them in action. It was 1998, and the opening week of Redd Rockett’s Pizza Port in Disneyland’s newly refurbished Tomorrowland. Melinamade’s “Disney Atomic” barkcloth was everywhere! In fact, the whole restaurant evoked the Googie design of the original 1955 Tomorrowland.

But among all the boomerangs, starbursts and rockets, it was the turquoise pattern on the booths that really stood out. I e-mailed Copass that afternoon and learned that she had, indeed, been contracted by Disney to develop a special atomic pattern just for Redd Rockett’s Pizza Port.

Copass’ interest in vintage fabrics began a decade ago, when she started collecting twentieth-century furniture and curios. When she tried to re-cover a chair, she learned that many of the great fabrics of the fifties were as dead as the Edsel.  Eventually, she found a supplier of raw barkcloth and used her design experience to turn her hobby into a business. Melinamade has been in business for three years as a one-woman operation, and now offers 15 fabric and two vinyl designs.

Copass and her fabrics have been featured in many publications including the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Vogue magazine. WIRED Magazine spotlighted her business and called her as "a one-woman digital cottage industry," and her fabrics are used in the lobby of MTV’s Santa Monica headquarters.

Melinamade has been in business for 5 years as a one-woman operation; and now offers 15 fabric and 2 vinyl designs featuring a variety of Space Age and tiki motifs.

“Retro gives ‘Vintage’ a makeover and a new wardrobe by selecting the coolest elements of prior decades and incorporating them into the present day and age,” Copass said at a recent lecture before the Art Directors & Artists Club of Sacramento. “Fifties gems: patterns inspired by DNA, the atom, outer space, and geometry using shades of swimming-pool aqua, cotton-candy pink, creamsicle orange, and lemon chiffon yellows. However, to [modern eyes], these still-relevant designs are obscured by drab colors and out-dated styles that no longer ring true. Applying the principles of ‘retro’ to this dilemma, it was possible to excavate the best of fifties fabrics and leave the rest behind. The end result is fabric simultaneously new and old, modern and vintage – nineties and retro.”  

Some of the information in this article was taken from Melinamade.com. For more information, contact Melinamade Fabrics at (415) 333-6109 or visit http://www.melinamade.com