It was in the 19th Century that the paisley pattern first attracted a rebellious, progressive following. Its story was part of a wider “dialogue” between eastern and western cultures at the time, says Dennis Nothdruft, the curator of the Liberty in Fashion exhibition. “It was a cultural exchange, and also an industry.” In the Victorian era, trade between Britain and India was buoyant, and Liberty’s forward-thinking founder Arthur Lasenby Liberty, a friend of Oscar Wilde “who had real flair and exquisite taste”, as Nothdruft tells BBC Culture, quickly expanded thanks largely to a paisley-orientated collection. William Morris and the Arts-and-Crafts movement adapted the print, with William Holman Hunt and other Pre-Raphaelites depicting sumptuous paisley textiles in their paintings. It became an integral part of the Aesthetic Movement and the Art Nouveau Movement – and shorthand for sophisticated, arty bohemianism.

Far-out fashion

The next surge in paisley’s fashionability came in the 1960s, helped along by The Beatles – in their Eastern-influenced phase the band were paisley mad, and John Lennon even painted his Rolls-Royce with the pattern. It became emblematic of the ‘summer of love’ and the often eye-watering aesthetic of the psychedelic era, its vertiginous acid-trip patterns and mind-melting colours chiming with the hippy zeitgeist.

“It had a certain mystery and eastern promise about it that suited the times,” says textile designer and artist Sarah Campbell, who during the 1960s and ’70s created some of Liberty’s best-known interpretations of the print with her design partner Susan Collier, including the swirling, intricate Splendide. “Because of paisley’s origins, there has always been a sense of exoticism and luxury about it. It’s an organic motif that is also stylised and has a complexity and depth to it – we called the designs ‘paisloid’ because they were adaptations of traditional paisley.” Liberty ‘paisloids’ were used extensively by some of the top designers of the era including Jean Muir, Bill Gibb, Yves Saint Laurent, Biba and Bill Blass.