14 Highlights From Salone del Mobile 2024
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It’s officially Salone del Mobile season. The annual design summit in Milan is the largest of its kind, offering a chance for furniture and interior designers to display their newness. Fashion brands, as is their wont, can’t help but get in on the fun too, working across disciplines with various takeovers across the city that merge style and design for whimsical, luxurious results. There are hundreds of exhibits over the course of the week, and we’ve sorted through them all to bring you the highlights from some of fashion’s heaviest hitters that are sure to delight, inspire, and hopefully start dynamic conversations about their role in interior design, and vice versa. Click through to see them all.
Bottega Veneta Debuts ‘On the Rocks’
Bottega Veneta is one of the most craft-forward fashion brands around, with a rich history of leather work that draws inspiration from mid-century and modern design. Its latest Salone installation at Palazzo San Fedele, titled “On the Rocks,” is a collaboration with Cassina and Fondation Le Corbusier that reimagines the legendary LC14 Tabouret. A beacon of modernism, the stool was inspired by a wooden whiskey box Le Corbusier found along the South of France shoreline. Bottega Veneta creative director Matthieu Blazy even used the stools as seating for his winter 2024 show. Here, the boxes are rendered in Bottega’s signature Intreccio woven leather in striking primary colors of green, blue, red, and yellow. The collection also includes a special charred-wood version of the stool, made using traditional Japanese methods. To top it off, Pierre Debusschere shot supermodel Anok Yai sitting atop the leather Tabouret for a striking visual campaign.
Moncler Stages Centrale Station Takeover With ‘An Invitation to Dream’
Moncler is no stranger to epic public takeovers. Take, for instance, the brand’s 70th anniversary performance in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo in 2022. To celebrate Salone and its rich history, it is staging a first-of-its-kind takeover of Centrale Station, a historical building and central travel hub, with a photography exhibit adorning the walls in the central halls, plus a “hijacking” of the platform screens. Curated by Jefferson Hack and shot by Jack Davison, the exhibit celebrates the brightest cultural stars across disciplines, including singer Rina Sawayama, artist Daniel Arsham, and playwright Jeremy O. Harris.
Gucci Introduces Design Ancora
Gucci’s creative vision under Sabato de Sarno is marked by a rich berry red, which de Sarno is officially dubbing Ancora Red. In collaboration with curator Michela Pelizzari and architect Guillermo Santomà, Gucci transformed rooms in its Via Montenapoleone boutique into a museum-esque space featuring five legendary Italian designs rendered in the special hue. The striking slime-green walls make each piece stand out and emphasizes the crisp lines, form, and curvature—like this Mario Bellini La Mera modular sofa, for example.
Loewe Unveils ‘Loewe Lamps’
Loewe’s presence at Salone is expected at this point, considering creative director Jonathan Anderson’s fiendish obsession with objects and furniture and the brand’s annual Loewe Craft Prize, which brings a global perspective to handmade objects. This year, “Loewe Lamps”—the brand’s largest exhibition to date— is staged at Palazzo Citterio and features 24 artists’ take on the décor item. Designers like Enrico David and Hafu Matsumoto took a material-forward approach, using unlikely pairings of bamboo, glass, metal, and gossamer-thin canvas to play with the notion of light and its interaction with natural materials. In addition to the 12 lights, Loewe collaborated with bamboo artist Hafu Matsumoto on bespoke Hammock and Puzzle bags, plus two entirely new bag shapes. There’s also an eclectic assortment of custom fine ceramics, woven baskets, and even a limited-edition Roasted Hazelnut scented candle available for purchase.
Prada Frames Continues at the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum
For the third time, Prada is hosting Prada Frames, a symposium that focuses in on the relationship between design and our environment. This year’s edition is called “Being Home,” and investigates what shelter means today, and what socio-economic and environmental factors go into creating it. The symposium will have conversations across “rooms” of the house that include some of the following: the living room (Being Domestic/Political), the bathroom (Being Restless), the bedroom (Being Asleep), and the dining room (Being Familiar). Keynote speakers include Isabella Rossellini, Paola Antonelli, and Brigitte Baptiste.
Thom Browne and Frette Collaborate on ‘Time to Sleep’
Thom Browne decamped to Milan for his first Salone to introduce his collaboration with fine linen purveyors Frette. To commemorate their collaboration on bedding, featuring his four-stripe insignia on classic Thom gray fabric, the brand hosted a live performance, where dancers in tighty-whities dressed and undressed in an overt homage to Browne’s penchant for minimal performance art using motion and dance. The traditional Thom Browne preppy uniform and the act of dressing up gets flipped on its head, questioning—just as Billie Eilish did—where we all go when we fall asleep.
Loro Piana Hosts a Tribute to Cini Boeri
Loro Piana’s dedication to fine Italian craftsmanship is on fine display this Salone, with an exhibit honoring the late furniture designer Cini Boeri, whose modern shapes influence Italian design to this day. Her iconic creations, including the Boborelax chairs and Strips sofa (pictured here), are shown in reproductions made possible by Loro Piana, with the help of arflex and the Cini Boeri archive. Loro Piana provided its world-class fabrics that are durable yet incredibly fine to outfit the various pieces on display, which are set up like a room where guests can sit, feel, and interact with the pieces, just as Boeri would have wanted.
Saint Laurent Collaborates With Gio Ponti and Ginori
Saint Laurent comes to Salone with a line of porcelain plates made in partnership with the Gio Ponti Archives and the Fundación Anala y Armando Planchart. The brand’s creative director Anthony Vaccarello drew inspiration from Villa Planchart, Ponti’s mid-century masterpiece of a house built in Caracas, Venezuela for the Plancharts that burst with color, geometry, and astrological meaning. Ponti originally collaborated with Italian heavyweights Ginori 1735 to create custom tableware for the house, and now, Saint Laurent Rive Droite is reissuing 12 plates based on the original designs which will be available for purchase, including this “A” plate (for Anala and Armando) that mirrors the colors of Villa Planchart.
MCM Brings Wearable Art to Furniture
MCM’s inaugural Salone exhibit introduces the Wearable Casa collection, conceived and executed by design firm Atelier Biagetti. The seven-piece collection features modular furniture rooted in Bauhaus and mid-century design that’s meant to feel futuristic and yet entirely new. The tongue-in-cheek nature of the pieces, like this Chatty sofa pictured made of fluffy blocks that spell out “CASA,” will also be discoverable online through the metaverse, bringing the concept not only into the future, but to the masses as well.
Zegna Celebrates New Book Launch
Zegna’s long history in northern Italy begins with Oasi Zegna, a fertile land just below the Alps where Ermenegildo Zegna built over half a million trees in a successful case study of using community-based initiatives to heal the planet and put nature and humanity in harmony. The brand’s latest book, Born in Oasi Zegna, hopes to bring the mindset of Oasi to the world, with a tome detailing the meaning and significance behind this special place. And Zegna is bringing Oasi to Milan with a strong showing across the city, including providing the flowerbeds for the Duomo for the next three years, a pop-up at their flagship store, plus newsstands on Via Montenapoleone, Piazza Duomo, and in its HQ (pictured here), hoping to strike city dwellers with an urge to prioritize nature in their lives a little more each and every day.
Dolce&Gabbana Opens 'From the Heart to the Hands' Exhibit
Dolce&Gabbana chose Salone as the perfect timing to open their exhibit, From the Heart to the Hands, which traces a line through their work back to Italy and the love they hold for the artisans and craftspeople that bring their epic Alta Moda couture creations to life. It's a love letter to the passionate creativity of Italy, from its opera to its art, to its architecture; everything is an inspiration from the North to the South to Sicily.
Louis Vuitton Introduces Tableware Collection
Louis Vuitton's Salone presence included a custom-made bed trunk for those travelers who want to bring a cot with them at all times, but for the more everyday consumer, their tableware collection is a good place to start. The LV Monogram dances around the border of porcelain plate set and adorns espresso and tea cup and saucer sets, all rendered in rich sea blue or classic beige. The whole collection is already available for purchase.
LaDoubleJ Presents Dancing Plates
LaDoubleJ has steadily grown their presence at Salone, with homeware collections that merge creative director J.J. Martin's love for color and pattern with her love for homegoods. A visit to Seville inspired Martin's colorful new homeware line, Solar, which fuses Spanish mosaic tiling with the primary colors of Spanish castles, from rusty terra-cottas to sunny yellows. Martin enlisted creative director and artist Max Siedentopf to create a whirligig installation of wheels and spinning plates to bring the collection to life.
Miu Miu Launches Inaugual Literary Club
Miu Miu’s inaugural Literary Club, titled “Writing Life”, took place on the 17th and 18th and was a mix of readings, perofmrnaues and conversations surrounding the past, present and future lives of literary women. Curated by Italian writer and researcher Olga Campofreda, the two day symposium dove into past works like Alba De Cespedes’ Forbidden Notebook, and included conversations with writer Sheila Heti and performances by Arlo Parks. All in all, it goes to show Miu Miu walks the walk and talks the talk about supporting female artists, a natural extension of their Women’s Tales film series and dressing the modern woman.
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