Libby Sellers, Design Gallerist

Had you peeked into London gallerist Libby Sellers’s diary for the week of the Milan Furniture Fair earlier this month, you would have seen all the requisite stops on the circuit: Rossana Orlandi one afternoon, Lambrate and Tortona the next, plus a stop at Satellite and a time out for breakfast at the Four Seasons with Alice Rawsthorn, who was her boss when she was a curator at the London Design Museum. There was time made for shopping — Sellers is a self-admitted clothes horse, having transformed most of her London apartment into a walk-in closet — and for a visit to the 10 Corso Como gallery and bookstore. But despite what you’d expect from one of the world’s most respected supporters of emerging design, who for the past two years has commissioned work from and produced pop-up exhibitions with talents like Max Lamb and Julia Lohmann, Sellers did not walk away from the fair with an arsenal of new relationships to pursue. Her talent scouting is done before she even gets there, in graduate degree shows and over the internet, so that in Milan — unlike the rest of us — she gets to relax and enjoy the show.

When we asked her to reflect on her time there and share her impressions and inspirations, eight examples of which follow in this slideshow, her answers weren’t at all indicative of what hot young things you can expect her to work with next. Some of them catalogued simple joys she found in a Marti Guixe tea towel or a bread-making workshop, while others shed light on her creative point of view and the factors that drive her to take on new talent. The show she liked best, for example, exhibited the results of a residency in Turin that challenged young designers to explore their own motivations and methods. “Design has to have a reason,” Sellers explains. “I’m not interested in it being a modernist mantra of form follows function. If it’s vacuous and self-indulgent it’s of no use to anyone, but if it pushes a boundary or asks a question or answers one — that’s critical design, and that’s what I’m after.”