Andy Warhol’s banana, Verner Panton’s ‘Flowerpot’ lamps, Eero Saarinen’s ‘Tulip’ chair, Mary Quant’s miniskirts: these are surely some of the most enduring icons of late-60s design, creating the template for the free-spirited, shagpile-saturated 70s. Yet Keith Richards – a tongue-in-cheek shrine to whom is affixed above a doorway in Barnaba Fornasetti’s radically cool casa – noted, famously, that ‘People are still wondering what the hell happened in the 60s. Most people … can’t remember.’ Not so perhaps for Donna Summer, whose album I Remember Yesterday was on rotation at Miu Miu’s luxe Literary Club, the lounge of which resembled a retro Kirsch catalogue spread: all carmine carpeting and mid-century furniture.
The brief blip of 60s/70s revival in 2022 returned in full, fierce force at Salone: thick tufted rugs and butter, toast and avocado hues (here’s looking at you, Faye Toogood x Tacchini, Anglepoise and JOV x Laurids Gallée), as well as its more outre accoutrements. Take for instance creative duo Barbieri Magalini’s Specular Oasis at Spazio MM where a modular sofa by Christine Kalia in Barbarella-silver leather snaked over a bed of sand in a hall of mirrors (far out!); Richard Hutten’s Warhol-esque banana overlay on a classic carpet for Jaipur Rugs; and, indeed, Dimorestudio x Loro Piana’s surreal 70s villa. The maddest of these era-defining reimaginings was undoubtedly Range Rover’s camp Futurespective: Connected Worlds ‘time capsule’, designed in collaboration with NUOVA. Met by a ‘flight attendant’ in a baby-blue Pan Am-inspired uniform, visitors had their passports stamped for a trip to the past. The first room, inspired by a 1970s car dealership, sported oxblood sofas, an Enzo-esque circular table in Carrara marble, a silver Panton-silouhette lamp, and two Italian actors greeting guests with groovy lingo between the wood pannelling, working fish tank and a classic olive-green YVB 151H Rover. That 70s show continued with a new line of furniture that interiors designer Giampiero Tagliaferri crafted for Minotti; a breath of fresh air for the Italian brand. To give something of a riposte to Keith’s offhand comment about this era, look no further than Andy W: ‘They say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.’ Salute to the 70s revival!
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‘They say that once you’ve seen the Boffi showroom, you can die’ – happily one must assume, given Piero Lissoni’s lush architectural preservation of the brand’s Milanese flagship store. This fragment of conversation, overheard while traversing the Brera district, was almost (but not quite) inspiration enough to brave the queues, which circled the block around the aforementioned building, as well as that of Loro Piana x Dimorestudio’s PR-guarded The First Night of Quiet – an experiential masterpiece (so I’ve been told) and highlight for many, including our intrepid creative director at large, Hamish Bowles, who was naturally whisked inside. Not so appealing was the frantic buzz around another no-expenses-spared cinematic installation that, despite its poppy palette, didn’t quite translate under harsh lighting and multiple ‘no photography’ signs. Is it worth seeing everything? If the glazed-eyed stares of i giornalisti della stampa on day two was anything to go by, one tends to think that seeing too much translates to the kind of image blindness that makes one confuse the truly dreadful with the truly visionary.
A delightful tea ceremony hosted by Loewe was calming to the nerves and a balm to the kind of design neurosis born of overstimulation that makes one want to describe teapots as ‘quotidian objet’. Timothy d’Offay of Postcard Teas explained tea making, and particularly the Loewe Fiori e Sapori blend, with a gentle zealotry that made the year-long process to produce the tea (a mix of Indian black tea leaves, Italian bergamot, French lemon verbena, Moroccan roses and Croatian chamomile) seem reasonable rather than absurdist. If only one could take home a teapot in addition to the ubiquitous (and one must say cleverly designed) envelopes stamped with a Beatrix Potter illustration that the brand handed out to the visiting throngs. But which to select? Of the 25 – forgive me – appealing pourers, Lu Bin’s stoneware set, with its appearance of folded metal, was a standout, as indeed was Laia Arqueros’s Vitex linguae-impudicitia – a flower-person-shaped pot with the kind charming sass that leaves you with no doubt as to whether or not it’s good design.
Rococo meets brutalism, David Lynch meets the nouvelle vague, postmodernism meets Arabic geometry! ‘Man is condemned to be free,’ as Sartre noted – free, that is, to remix, cross-reference and cut-and-paste at will; condemned to produce both the sacred (William Burroughs’s The Soft Machine) and the profane (Colgate’s TV dinners). Salone had no shortage of such imaginative mash-ups (see the aforementioned pairings), and not least a strong focus on literature (in the words of ABBA and all non-native Italian speakers: Mamma mia!) Interior design and literature have always had the kind of uneasy relationship of exes at a wedding: for the most part, the literary world relegates design to the coffee table tome, while the design world tends to classify literary types under ‘tweed elbow patches’. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, but for the purposes of scene-setting, let’s stick to these stereotypes.
Enter thus the literary world to Salone, albeit in remixed form: fashion brand Miu Miu’s Literary Club hosted a salon-style symposium centred on Simone de Beauvoir and Fumiko Enchi, while Galerie Pradier-Jeanneau envisioned a ‘mysterious boutique’ complete with a mannequin reading Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad. The ‘Do You Speak Flower?’ book launch focused on floriography (there’s a message in that), Tutto Bene’s ‘Legato’ lamps – shaped like open books – subtly winked across a crowded room, and Es Devlin’s monumental revolving Library of Light rotated to the music of Beethoven. To borrow from the OED, ‘gallimaufry’ might well describe this miscellany of ideas mixed together, but I reckon that these experiments are always worth undertaking. Who knows – perhaps a certain festive setting might lead to a rekindling of passion between design and literature? Indeed, making the most of a hunger for the written word, Belmond opened its Airmail Kiosk, stacked to the roof with all kinds of publications – including this one – arranged cheek to cheek. Hot tip: if the mood has taken you to put pen to paper post-Salone, entries are open for WoI’s Writing Competiton, created in partnership with Montblanc.
Hungry for more stories from Salone? You are in luck. Our crack team of decoration investigators have microfibred their microscopes; loupes poised over all the most important details of design’s headline event. Do you agree with their musings from Milano? Read more about Milan Design Week from decoration associate David Lipton and style director Gianluca Longo.
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