It’s not a stretch to call
Milan Design Week the design world’s largest
annual global event. The commercial anchor of the yearly fair is Salone
Internazionale del Mobile — the trade show, held this year from Tuesday through
Sunday at the Rho fairgrounds, where design lovers, curators, and the
industry’s key players convened to discover and unveil the latest product and
furniture releases from around the world.
اضافة اعلان
Within the city, a sprawling network of related
events, together known as Fuorisalone, results in a citywide takeover teeming
with gallery and showroom exhibitions, pop-up installations, independent
satellite fairs and Instagram-worthy brand activations.
After a canceled 2020 edition and a somewhat
lackluster 2021 “Supersalone” event last fall that was thrice postponed, this
year the fair, which is usually held in April, marks Salone’s 60th edition, and
a major return after
COVID-19 roiled the industry’s calendar of fairs — not to
mention the supply chain issues that soon followed.
“This year is a restart with a lot of positivity and
energy, and the joy of being together to experiment through design,” said Marva
Griffin Wilshire, founder and curator of SaloneSatellite, the fair’s capsule
program for new and emerging talent.
“This has felt a bit like a transitional year,
though it hasn’t yet felt clear what direction that transition will lead to,”
said Aric Chen, artistic director of Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, the
Netherlands, and former director of Design Miami. “It hasn’t felt like there’s
been as much focus on ‘the new,’ in part because everyone’s been so focused on
surviving.” He noted that this year’s Milan Design Week felt more grounded in
critical discussion.
“There is a palpable sense of sustainability and
responsibility as normalcy,” said Paola Antonelli, senior curator of
architecture and design at New York’s
Museum of Modern Art, especially among
young and emerging studios. “There’s much more discussion and also display
alongside these objects — chairs, carpets, and furniture — concerning their
life cycle, which makes a gigantic difference. There are also installations and
discussions about the role of design in society at large, without focusing on
objects unnecessarily. But objects are now the Trojan horse for those topics,
in a way they were not necessarily as much before.”
“Sustainability has been a consistent theme here,”
said interior designer Kelly Wearstler, with many established studios and
brands such as Hermès, Martino Gamper and Dimorestudio “re-imagining vintage
works” or making use of reusable materials.
Although the only certainty of Milan Design Week is
that one cannot possibly see it all within the week, many more people turned
out this year than last, showing how much the fair had been missed. And as
always, the key design take-aways made the effort worth it.
‘Slow design’
Designers and brands,
established and emerging alike, embraced the many faces of craftsmanship from
across cultures.
“I feel that every
time there’s a big change in culture and technology, crafts and local means of
production reemerge in a very important way,” Antonelli said, “a kind of slow
design that is similar to the notion of slow food. We still have the means of
production that are industrial, of course, but now we have, in a way, come to
reevaluate and appreciate modes of making that are not necessarily industrial.”
One exhibition that highlighted craft, identity and
storytelling was “This Is America,” spotlighting a diverse selection of
independent American designers. The curators, Jenny Nguyen, Liz Wert and Alma
Lopez, focused on wide-ranging talent and intimate, sometimes poignant
dimensions of independent designers of color. One work that personally moved
Lopez was by Monica Curiel, a Mexican American designer whose artistic use of
plaster was a meaningful nod to her immigrant father, a construction worker,
and elevated the humble material.
Audrey Range, a designer based in Rotterdam,
demonstrated the evolving edge of hybridized craft with her “Emissive Chandelier,”
the latest in her ongoing series of works made from combining digital rendering
and 3D printing processes — a personal “digital sculpting” technique, as she
described it. The resulting work was an iridescent lavender, pale green and
silver and with a craggy, sheen surface visually reminiscent of brocade.
Meanwhile, the renowned designer Martino Gamper presented “Innesto (rubbing up
on the wrong tree),” in which he applied the analogy of plant grafting to
upcycle a set of damaged vintage 1930s Cox furnishings by inserting segments of
furniture legs and surface details to create a visual mash-up of old and new.
“Sometimes, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel,” Gamper said, “maybe just a
detail or a particular joint, like with trees.”
Eye candy
“Across the board, the use
of color this year is really refreshing to see, where previously it was quite
monochrome,” Wearstler said.
For all the uncertainties of the past three years,
the perennial trend of sleek geometric forms and colorful palettes has been a
mainstay for the social media era. It’s an aesthetic that equally pleases the
eye and translates well to the screen.
Highlights among the many polychromatic offerings
ranged from artist Laila Gohar and Belgian design studio Muller Van Severen’s
collaborative Pigeon table — a charming take on a buffet table made for
entertaining, with colorful tiered displays and inspired by bird perches from
Gohar’s childhood in Egypt — to “Monumental Wonders,” a multilayered, colorful
entryway from design firm OMA featuring natural and semiprecious stones from
the company SolidNature.
Others included India Mahdavi’s Loop chair,
available in three colors, for Thonet, and a collection of vessels and objects
from independent designers, including Studio Berg, which took direct
inspiration from candies and sweets.
The great indoors
The mere sight of plants is
said to foster a sense of calm. After
pandemic lockdowns that sent many
spending months in isolation at home, designers embraced the serenity and
escapism of pastoral settings and landscapes. With motifs ranging from
waterways to botanical paintings and forested landscapes, several designers
shared collections that offered aestheticized takes on biophilia.
Calico Wallpaper has centered many of its designs
around abstracted nature scenes, including sunsets, moonscapes and flowers. For
the company’s latest release, Tableau, a collaboration with the interior design
and architecture studio AB Concept, the team looked outside for inspiration.
Conifer-dotted, alpine mountain ranges in a range of eight painterly metallic
colorways are based on photographs that AB Concept’s founder, Ed Ng, took from
his home in Karuizawa, Japan.
“We had just moved from the city to upstate New York during
the pandemic, and like
Eddie, we now live in a mountain house that’s completely
surrounded by beautiful forests,” said Rachel Cope, creative director and
co-founder of Calico Wallpaper. “This idea of bringing the outside inside is
something we’ve always done at Calico, but because of the pandemic, we’re even
more focused on bringing in these immersive landscapes that can transport us to
another place and time.”
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