The Monocle Minute
On Design

With Milan Design Week now a memory, we relive the highlights of the fair – and reflect on the key things that we learned. So, we admire the whimsical charm of Spanish luxury fashion house Loewe’s collection of chairs on the grounds of the Palazzo Isimbardi, marvel at the refined geometries of Norman Foster’s new collection of furniture for Japanese timber specialist Karimoku Furniture, and much more. First, Nic Monisse reflects on a week of unexpected delights, starting with Alcova (pictured).

The takeover of iconic venues during Milan Design Week was a common theme at this year’s event. Spanish luxury fashion house Loewe continued its foray into homeware and design by showcasing a collection of chairs in the courtyard and garden of the Palazzo Isimbardi.

The 30 pieces on display, a combination of reworked antiques and new designs, harked back to the humble Welsh stick chair – a favourite of Loewe’s creative director, Jonathan Anderson – albeit with a high-fashion twist. Leather straps, silver and gold foils, and plenty of raffia were incorporated into the designs, while paper loom chairs by the Belgian weaving experts at Vincent Sheppard sat pretty with leather cushions. The showcase wouldn’t have been an Anderson project without a touch of whimsy: the stone mushroom sculptures in the courtyard, the bases of which were once used in Spanish granaries, delighted visitors to the palazzo as much as the buyers of the eccentric chairs.

Milan Design Week insight: Design festivals offer the opportunity to open up forgotten corners of a metropolis to locals, ensuring that the city is celebrated in tandem with brands’ new releases.

At Milan’s Nilufar Gallery and its satellite venue, Nilufar Depot, founder Nina Yashar skilfully displays mid-20th-century works by past masters alongside bold, new creations. A case in point is Bì.Li.Co, Italian designer Maximilian Marchesani’s debut solo exhibition. Curated by Valentina Ciuffi of Studio Vedèt, the show, at Nilufar’s main space, opened as part of Milan Design Week. It features lighting installations made from the branches of beech and hazel trees, collected in Milan’s parks, with lighting cables running through hollowed-out limbs.

While unconventional, Marchesani’s avant-garde pieces fit nicely in the space, thanks to their thoughtful pairing with works such as Lina Bo Bardi’s Pompéia stool and Sergio Rodriguez’s Stella armchair.
nilufar.com

Milan Design Week insight: Avant-garde pieces can work in domestic settings when carefully paired with more classical pieces.

Founded in 2002, Rossana Orlandi’s eponymous gallery is one of Milan’s must-see destinations, drawing visitors from across the globe to an otherwise unremarkable corner of the city. Crowds turn out during Milan Design Week and beyond to check out what the celebrated design guru – who discovered formidable talents such as Nacho Carbonell, Piet Hein Eek, Maarten Baas and design duo Front – has decided to showcase. Here, she tells Monocle about curating shows and responsible design.

Why do you think Milan Design Week has become the foremost global industry event?
Milan is the centre of design and Italy is the heart of design production. We work with companies from all over the world here. The strength of the Milanese has been to get people from across the whole world to attend.

Tell us about your approach to curating a show for Milan Design Week.
Looking around me, I see works by designers from everywhere – from Holland, Mauritius, Spain, Denmark and France. I involve emerging designers with big brands; a lot of partnerships are born between them. This year, Citroën showed a prototype of an electric car here. What distinguishes what I do is that I don’t follow trends and I create dialogues between very different pieces and designers. I have chosen to have my own eclectic gallery and not try to be a museum. We are constructing the story of design. We love choosing, exhibiting and bringing things to the world’s attention – and making them important.

As part of Milan Design Week, you also staged the Ro Plastic Prize. Could you explain it and tell us how it became part of your vision?
Design isn’t like fashion with its seasonality – it’s a calmer, more contemplative world, guided by the idea of durability. Design is for life, so designers need a genuine sense of responsibility: to be attentive in what they do and think about transportation, recycling and the materials that they use when they create an object. I launched the Ro Plastic Prize in 2019 with my son because I believe that it’s not plastic that’s bad; it’s the misuse of it that’s wrong. We need to engage designers in its reuse and also make them think differently about how they design. Every year we have more people involved. This is a difficult period in the world but we’re trying to keep moving forward with an enormous sense of responsibility.

For more design tips and tales from industry leaders such as Rossana Orlandi, pick up a copy of the Salone del Mobile Special, Monocle’s limited-edition newspaper, which covers Milan Design Week and beyond.

As part of a new collaboration, Argentine artist Cristián Mohaded has brought a dreamlike landscape inspired by the Andes to the courtyard of Italian textile specialist Loro Piana’s Milan headquarters. The towering, fabric-clad totems reference the piles of stones left by travellers marking safe passage across South America’s best-known mountains.

Mohaded’s collection of wood and fabric sofas nods to these stone piles, while coffee tables and stools take inspiration from Argentine lagoons, with red and white ceramic finishes on the surface of the tables. For Loro Piana, which provided the fabrics for the collaboration, the Latin American connection runs deep: the northwestern province of Catamarca that is Mohaded’s home is also where the brand sources its ultra-soft vicuña fibres.
loropiana.com

Milan Design Week insight: Tapping into heritage doesn’t necessarily mean returning to a brand’s historic roots – those of its material suppliers are equally worthy of celebration.

Japanese timber specialist Karimoku Furniture is renowned for partnering with architects to create bespoke pieces. The furniture and objects are mostly then put into production. An example is the new NF Collection, made for the Foster Retreat at Martha’s Vineyard, a space for creatives, from researchers to writers, to contemplate solutions for the challenges facing cities. Designed by Norman Foster, the collection includes a dining chair, stools, a lounge chair, a sofa and a dining table, all of which made their public debut at Salone del Mobile. The pieces are defined by simple silhouettes and refined geometries, and bring a sense of peace and calm to any room that they’re in – appropriate, given the environment that they were created for.
karimoku.com

Milan Design Week insight: Designing furniture with an end project in mind can help to imbue a piece with a sense of purpose; more architects should consider putting bespoke pieces into wider production.

The titles of Tim Walker’s previous exhibitions tell you a lot about how the British fashion photographer approaches his art: Dreamscapes, Story Teller, Wonderful Things. Since the mid-1990s he has majored in narrative-driven shoots in fantastical settings. His latest commission, exhibited during Milan Design Week, is no different. The Art of Craftsmanship is a collection of images and a video that celebrate the handmade quality of Tod’s, the luxury shoe and leather goods company. Models who were street-cast in Milan are seen playfully interacting with oversized handbags, thread reels and shoe lasts.

The photographer was inspired to focus on craftsmanship after visiting the brand’s workshops in Italy’s Marche region. “The artisanal tools are so specific to the creation of Tod’s iconic products,” says Walker. “We wanted to find a way to celebrate them in a slightly surreal way in the photographs, playing with perspective, and hopefully with some wit.”
tods.com

Milan Design Week insight: Brands and designers don’t have to rely on “standard” campaign imagery to tell their stories. Asking masters of the discipline to lend their creative eye can lead to stunning results.