Sometimes the most interesting ideas arrive in the most unexpected ways. Maya Karpel Regev, a graduate of the Design Program at the Kibbutzim College, managed to take something we all know – a simple cloth napkin – and turn it into a final project full of thought, humor, and questions about how we sit, eat, and behave around the table.
It all actually began from a different direction. Maya planned to work with fabric and screen printing, and then she saw on Instagram an invitation from “Asif” – the Israeli Culinary Center in Tel Aviv – to come and take surplus books from their library. She went with a friend early in the morning to get her hands on the best books, and came back home with a heavy bag of books (that tore along the way…) and with a completely new idea.
Among the books was L’art culinaire français – a classic French cookbook from the 1950s, presenting elegant cuisine, precise techniques, and beautiful presentation. For Maya, it was like a glimpse into a formal world full of rules and regulations, facing our most basic desires – to eat, to taste, to enjoy.
Childhood Memories and Questions of Manners
Her connection to the subject actually began in childhood. Her grandfather would seat her at the table and teach her how to hold the knife correctly, what to do with the small fork, and how to sit “like a lady.” She, on her part, only wanted to eat with her hands and feel the food. Years later, she realized that there was something much deeper in it – a system of codes, almost like design, that dictates how we behave during a meal.
From the French book she moved on to research on still-life paintings in the vanitas style – those that combine juicy fruit and wine with symbols of decay and transience. The connection to the cloth napkin came naturally: At the beginning of the meal it is clean, folded, and orderly; at the end it is stained and worthless.
Maya scanned images from the book, reduced them to a single color, and adapted them for delicate screen printing. From the shapes she created letters, and from them sentences in English – mind your manners, hold it properly, kind and polite, please do. She printed them on the napkins so that the text and images would gradually reveal themselves as the folds were opened.
A Double Message: Beauty vs. Usefulness
The result is a series of napkins that convey a double message: Meticulous beauty and cleanliness on one side, and dirt and practicality on the other. Between bites, they invite us to rethink manners, gender, and how we behave around the table – all through a single everyday item that suddenly takes on new life.
Maya’s project proves that good design does not have to be complex or expensive. Sometimes it is enough to look again at the simplest things and ask: What do they really say about us?