Meet Tableau’s Julius Værnes Iversen, Danish Fashion’s Go-To Floral Artist 

Even as ideas around gender and self-expression evolve, fashion is still often linked to concepts like femininity, fragility, and sometimes even fickleness. And the bias exists in spheres beyond fashion, too. In Copenhagen, Julius Værnes Iversen is working to deconstruct such binding notions in the area of floral design, which he is elevating to the level of art.

The son of a wholesale florist, Iversen established his company almost four years ago. “I sort of created this very stylistic room for flowers, you could sort of call it a gallery for flowers,” he explained on a recent call. Since its start Tableau’s activities have expanded greatly, and now embrace set design (including for many fashion clients) and art installations. “We can design everything from a bench to a vase to a stool,” said Josphine Jein, who handles the company’s communications and e-commerce. “We also just added doing full interior spatial designs.”

Fashion and flowers have always been intertwined. Paul Poiret’s house symbol was a rose; Christian Dior spoke of his New Look being worn by femmes fleurs. Elie Saab was just one of the couturiers presenting during the fall 2021 season who likened the easing of lockdown restrictions to the blooming of a flower. For Iversen, who sees floral design going “hand in hand with the fashion industry,” the rooms of flowers Mark Colle created for Raf Simons’s couture debut for Christian Dior was the defining moment in his industry. “It was amazing what he did,” noted the Dane. “He really opened the door for floral artists or designers to really express themselves through installations. And since he did that, our work has become more and more attractive, and now it’s more or less a necessity for either a show, or set design for a photo shoot or a campaign shoot.”

Asked why he thinks that is, Iversen said, “it’s easy to relate to nature.” Maybe especially so in Scandinavia, where the artist said, “we’re spending most half of our life outside.” For many, the need for that sort of connection was intensified by COVID lockdowns and the growing awareness of the fragility of the environment.

Tableau does exterior and interior installations, but most often Iversen speaks to the collective desire to engage with the natural world by bringing the outside in. This means that the flowers are speaking both to their audience and to the architectural space they are occupying. In Copenhagen, these are often tall and white. “Clean lines is a good description for a lot of creativity in Denmark in general,” said Iversen, who in turn uses dyed flowers to create tonal compositions. “We like contrast and we like monochromatic minimalism,” he said.

Minimal or maximal (there’s a rococo vein in some of Iversen’s work), in this artist’s universe flowers aren’t decorative accessories, they are lead characters. “Tableau, which [originates] from Latin originally, means a small scene or a scenario,” explained Iversen, “and for me, when you create a flower installation, you are creating a small scene or a small story.” All of Tableau’s tales are about the botanical world in one way or another. They also advocate for a reassessment of that world in relation to other areas of art and design.

“We try to make flowers become a material used within the art scene, which they haven’t been before. Because of the fact that flowers are a material that die quite quickly, it’s been quite difficult to use them within the world of arts in general, but that has become more and more accepted within the past 10 years,” he said. “We’re trying to make the botanical industry more respected than it has been, [so] the people working within it—or some of them—can be seen as artists and not just floral designers or florists.” And why not? The brevity of a flower’s bloom might be fleeting, but art, no matter what it’s made of, lives forever.