One night in Milan, one for each night of the week of Furniture expo and the Fuorisalone, to dance together with creatives and make love with design. It is fashion that sets the pace, that makes the districts from Brera to Alcova vibrate like tuning forks, making us passionate about those connections that we would not have dared to imagine in full sunlight: here’s why Gio Ponti for Saint Laurent or Le Corbusier for Bottega Venetathey seem more real and possible after sunset.
The border that goes from dusk towards evening becomes a space of sublimation of time and rules, a truce where fashion houses and architects huddle and work together. In the objects and projects that we have seen in this 2024, the nocturnal dimension is a condition that translates into the subtraction or search for light, in the construction of intimate environments, of boxes where one can find oneself and leaf through or relive one’s memories, in pieces designed to hug us, to convey a feeling of comfort that resembles that of returning home after a long day.
Stone Island, Prototype Research, Experimental Space
We perceived it in the rough penumbra of Stone Island in via Savona 54. The prototypes which due to their complexity cannot yet go into production are technical masterpieces, they merge the culture of boating and that of motoring, they think about fabric as a living and evolving material – glass fiber and linen, double lamination pigment coatings of polyurethane film – support for men for a concept of dressing bordering on the revolutionary. Divided into Intellectual Space And Experiential Spacethe Prototype Research installation establishes a dialectic between the archive, with the silhouettes of models from the 1980s and 1990s, and the future in a post-industrial concrete and steel box.
Stone Island Prototype Research in via Savona 54
For thatStill which is a need for uncompromising beauty that Sabato De Sarno would like for Guccithe Spanish architect Guillermo Santoma puts aside its decadent verve. On the first floor of the boutique Montenapoleone there is the non-place 2.0, a living room to be here and in an elsewhere within reach of the imagination: a series of completely muffled rooms, upholstered in bright green velvet, a continuous green-screen, between floors and walls, from which five design icons in Gucci red stand out for their visual impact and evocative power. They are the Storet chest of drawers by Nanda Vigo for Acerbis; the Parola lamp by Gae Aulenti and Piero Castiglioni for FontanArte; the Le Mura sofa by Mario Bellini for Tacchini; a vase from the Opachi series by Tobia Scarpa for Venini; recent and made to order, the Clessidra carpet that CC Tapis extrapolated from an original pattern by Nicolò Castellini Baldissera, great-grandson of Piero Portaluppi.
The Le Mura sofa by Mario Bellini in Gucci red in the space designed by Guillermo Santomà
There is Loewe who gathered twenty-four artists from all latitudes and asked them to manipulate light to bring it to Citterio Palace. Floor, table and pendant, the Loewe Lamps are each a totem; bodies that are not only shining, reflect on the element that allows us to know the world. No limits on the use of materials – from birch wood to horsehair, from glass to ceramics and tanned leather – nor on the shapes that often go beyond the ordinary. The maison reiterates the most ambitious of its objectives: to give strength to new voices in craftsmanship, integrating centuries-old traditions and artistic avant-garde.
The Loewe Lamps installation in the basement of Palazzo Citterio
The almost mystical home Villa Planchart“the grace of a butterfly resting on a hill”, the Venezuelan dream of Gio Ponti which has been touching the sky of Caracas since the 1950s, envelops the Benedictine cloister of San Simpliciano. The architect of the union between the Gio Ponti Archives, the Fondacion Anala y Armando Planchart and Saint Laurent is Anthony Vaccarello, who, with Richard Ginori, reissues a service of dishes: geometries between porcelain and gold, balances of graphics in the edition very limited and non-replicable, installed as relics for public admiration.
Saint Laurent’s installation in the Cloister of San Simpliciano
Even higher, beyond the stratosphere, to Mars, we go with MCM. Fashion for traveling a little beyond the boundaries of our planet and a little deeper into technology: in metaverse with furnishings designed to be comfortable and developed with street irony, bordering on the erotic of Atelier Biagetti. An extendable backpack, a two-dimensional vest, a modular sofa that is a soft tag and other phantasmagoria coexist Cusani Palacein via Brera 13/15.
Atelier Biagetti x MCM at Palazzo Cusani
Vetsak x Aspesi, Transformationthe collaboration you don’t expect Corso Venezia 14. If it is true that both brands share a very strong attachment to tradition and the values of craftsmanship, it is equally true that on the one hand there is a round, material, seductive design, an invitation to abandon oneself to the indulgences that one can indulge in on the abundance of a seat, and on the other the rigor of minimalism, of that essential which condemns the opulent. Three modular sofas, huge, to fall into and stay there; there ready to hold us and be held by just as many giant puppets. Dense, bold colors, purple, blue, orange, yellow, teal shades, and softness for every season.
Vetsak x Aspesi, Transformation
From Rimowa in via Maiocchi 3, let’s take the most Italian of coffees; to grind it and return it to us in a mixture at the perfect temperature La Marzocco. Together they transformed the small place adjacent to the Spazio Maiocchi into a bar halfway between German modernism and popular Florentine style. There are the Berlin-made cups and the damask satin curtains, the dark wood and the lacquered tiles; in the center the steel model of the Mini Line.
The Rimowa and La Marzocco café in via Maiocchi 3
Off we go Cola di Rienzo 8, Antonio Marras he asks us to descend with him into those depths Where the sea cannot be touched. Despite marras, to which the creative adds a piece from year to year without ever weighing down the existing one, it is a house to loosen the brakes of routine. There are rooms like walk-in closets in which to get lost among mirrors and grandmother’s skirts, a hanging garden, lush, voluptuous with plants and porcelain enamel reflections, and still others where you can sit at dinner as if we were guests in Atlantis. And then there is the outdoors together with the innovators of Nodo Italia, a modular sofa, the Eva chair, several poufs, four rugs in whose weaves come together the ancient gestures of the hands that composed them and the colors of the maison infused by immersion in the fibers of polypropylene, a feast for the senses under the eyes of Ulysses and Gennariello, the sailors illustrated on the wallpaper in collaboration with Wall&decò.
Marras outdoor armchair for Nodo Italia and wallpaper for Wall&decò
For those who can’t resist a tour of the shop windows, you should see those of Marni, Balenciaga And Bottega Veneta (who left here a small taste of his installation On the Rocks) in via Montenapoleone, and those of Longchamp And Issey Miyake in via della Spiga.
Marni, Showcase
I am short-sighted and astigmatic. Two visual defects to which I owe an anthropological necessity: that of understanding before focusing. People, landscapes and objects, through the lens of fashion, which I use for training, seem a little clearer to me. The one of journalism, which I learn to wear every day, helps me to (re)define the context, update it and translate it into small contemporary stories for Elledecor.it, Esquire.it and Harpersbazaar.it
Tags: FuoriSalone fashion
