NY Times

Color, Craft and Comfort at Milan Design Week

Trends from the largest global design event, celebrating its 60th year.

By Aileen Kwun

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 June 7 through 12 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.

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, the 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, the artistic director of Rotterdam’s Het Nieuwe Instituut 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, the 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 the interior designer Kelly Wearstler, with many established studios and brands such as Hermès, Martino Gamper and Dimorestudio “reimagining vintage works” or making use of reusable materials.

Though the only certainty of Milan Design Week is that one can’t 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 takeaways 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 re-emerge in a very important way,” Ms. 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 re-evaluate 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 Ms. 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 Large, 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 3-D 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,” Mr. Gamper said, “maybe just a detail or a particular joint, like with trees.”

One thing that hadn’t changed was the melding of the fashion and furniture worlds, which have become increasingly close bedfellows in the past decade, with luxury brands like Dior, Hermès and Louis Vuitton heavily investing in their presence. Loewe’s presentation, “Weave, Restore, Renew,” shined a light on regenerative craft practices from Spain, Galicia and Korea that highlight the beauty of age and repair; each has informed a collection of four new woven bag designs made from straw, leather and corded paper.

Creature Comforts

An installation view from Atelier Biagetti’s Pet Therapy Alessandro Saletta, DSL Studio/Courtesy of Atelier Biagetti

Derriere armchair from Bohinc Studio’s Peaches collection, inspired by the female form Rebecca Reid

Eny Lee Parker’s Cloud chair John Parvin McBride

Partners in work and life, Alberto Biagetti and Laura Baldassari, of Atelier Biagetti, are known to produce ironic, tongue-incheek installations that explore design as a storytelling device and “create a sense of theater that speaks to the emotions,” Mr. Biagetti said. In previous showings, the duo have tackled taboo conversations around obsessions with wealth, the culture of fitness and even sexuality. This year, they embraced their inner child — and a request from their young daughter to create, rather than a piece of furniture, “a giant cat you can hug,” sized at surreal, Fellini-esque proportions.

A series of new seating pieces inspired by slumber was showcased by the Los Angeles upstart Otherside Objects, founded by Sam Klemick, a fashion designer who transitioned into woodworking and furniture at the onset of the pandemic. “I’m really obsessed with sleeping and dreams, and the fact that we spend so much of our lives dreaming without even understanding or being able to make sense of it,” she said. An oversize collection of seating, featuring tufted, duvet-like cushions and rounded conical legs continued a motif of her work, reminiscent of mushroom stalks and inspired by geometric topiaries from an iconic scene from the film “Last Year at Marienbad,” the classic 1961 French New Wave film that unfolds in an elliptical, dreamlike state. Intimately aware of the fashion industry’s scale of waste, Ms. Klemick’s designs make use of salvaged wood and deadstock fabrics whenever possible.

Elsewhere, the New York designer Eny Lee Parker debuted the Cloud chair in a group exhibition presented by artist Daniel Arsham and StockX, the online marketplace favorite of hypebeasts and sneaker heads, alongside the fashion label Wales Bonner, the Swiss furniture company USM and others. Additional works that cradle and comfort the body, including Bohinc Studio’s Peaches seating collection — made from curvaceous, voluptuous contours celebrating the female form — spoke to a desire for tactile connection, comfort and solace in an ongoing pandemic era.

Eye Candy

Otherside Objects’s Garden seating collection, made from salvaged materials Jonathan Hokklo

“Across the board, the use of color this year is really refreshing to see, where previously it was quite monochrome,” Ms. 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 the artist Laila Gohar and the 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 Ms. Gohar’s childhood in Egypt — to “Monumental Wonders,” a multilayered colorful entryway from the design firm OMA featuring natural and semiprecious stone from the company SolidNature.

Others included India Mahdavi’s Loop chair, available in three colors, for Thonet, and a collection of vessels and objets from independent designers, including Studio Berg, which took direct inspiration from candies and sweets.

The Great Indoors

Tableau collection for

Wallpaper AB Concept

Front Design’s Pebble Rubble sofa for Moroso Alessandro Paderni

Álvaro Catalán de Ocón’s Plastic Rivers rug collection for GAN Álvaro Catalán de Ocón

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, the 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.”

Immersive, floral scenes also made a splash in the Milanese brand Pictalab’s “Portaluppi Herbarium,” a new collection of printed floral wallpaper that created a trompe l’oeil homage to a grand garden room at the late Milanese architect Piero Portaluppi’s Casa Atellani, a historic Milanese palazzo.

Meanwhile, “On Forest,” a symposium curated by the research and design studio Formafantasma as the debut iteration of Prada Frames, brought together a multidisciplinary mix of artists, activists, law experts and scientists to critically discuss the relationship between design and the natural environment.

Correction: June 13, 2022

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a designer. She is Audrey Large, not Range. A picture caption with the article also misspelled the surname of a designer. She is Dahye Jeong, not Joeng.

Nicolo Castellini Baldissera’s Portaluppi Herbarium collection for Pictalab Max Pescio