Perhaps due in part to the sunnier weather, the cloud of economic gloom that hung overhead during Milan’s 2013 Salone del Mobile was decidedly less pronounced this time around. The Rho Fairgrounds felt more robust and more cheerful, overflowing with new releases and, particularly among the Italian brands, a plethora of midcentury reissues.
“Nineteen-fifties Italian style is joyful, energetic, and multi-functional,” Cedric Morisset, head of the design department at Paris’s Piasa auction house, recently told ARTINFO during an interview in his showroom. Midcentury designs, developed after World War II to fill a surge of newly constructed urban spaces, are efficient by nature, and their compactness and modularity perfectly address our current needs for space efficiency. More importantly, they’re far less of a gamble.
“It’s safer than having a young designer to work on a specific project,” Morisset continued, referring to the still dismal economic climate in Milan. After surveying last week’s festivities in that city, this reporter stopped by a well-timed exhibition of 1950s and ’60s Italian design at Morisset’s Paris auction house, and found an uncanny resemblance between his secondary market wares and the new launches we had just seen at Salone. “When you have the drawings and the name and the techniques already developed, it’s much easier for marketing. Honestly, I think that new design comes when the economy is good,” he said.
Poltrona Frau, of which Michigan-based brand Haworth acquired a majority stake in February, was one of several Italian brands in on this revival trend. During the fair, the company launched the Albero, a clever, pole-mounted revolving bookcase designed in the 1950s by late Italian architect Gianfranco Frattini, as well as Gastone Rinaldi’s 1953, single-shell DU30 chair, reissued with its original visible screws as an homage to Rinaldi’s design. Sister company Cassina went into the archives of Simon, a midcentury brand founded in 1968 by the late Dino Gavina, and resurrected works by modernist greats Marcel Breuer, Kazuhide Takahama, and Gavina himself, as well the 1952 Mexique Table and swiveling 1943 Indochine Chair from Charlotte Perriand’s lusted-after estate. Molteni & C paid homage to Gio Ponti with a full exhibition of his works in its showroom, along with the reissue of two chairs from his 1970 Casa Adatte manifesto. Kartell reissued its midcentury and more recent past in new metallic finishes, gilding Anna Castelli Ferrieri’s 1969 modular Componibili storage system and Philippe Starck’s 2009 Master’s Chair in silver and gold.
Of course, it wasn’t just the Italians. Scandinavia, the world’s other capital of design, had plenty of throwbacks of its own. Denmark’s Carl Hansen & Søn relaunched Hans Wegner’s 1963 Shell Chair with new Paul Smith-designed Maharam upholstery, while fellow Danish brand Fritz Hansen revived Arne Jacobsen’s 1958 Drop Chair. Finland’s Artek, co-founded by the late great Alvar Aalto in 1935 and acquired by German brand Vitra in 2013, launched three reissues of Aalto icons — the 400 and 401 Armchairs, designed in 1936 and 1932, plus the 1933 Stool 60 — in soft new colorways by Vitra art director and newly appointed Artek creative director Hella Jongerius.
“I don’t have to constantly be creating the new,” Jongerius recently told Disegno Daily. “I like to refresh classics, because I believe that you don’t need to create new stuff all the time.” She has a point. The midcentury was a golden age of design in Italy and around the globe. As the world’s capital of design struggles financially, the show must go on, and better to do so with well-worn, proven classics than a proliferation of wares that may come and go. That’s the last thing the design world needs now.
