50 Pieces and Presentations We Loved at The 2024 Milan Furniture Fair

Rather than seeing the ever-spiraling array of events at Salone as a source of FOMO and a series of missed opportunities a journalist could never hope to comprehensively cover, we began to look at Milan in a new light this year, and you'll see that reflected in our coverage. We'll be devoting longer stories to particular favorites, or to things that maybe passed under your radar, rather than doing roundups of every single thing we saw and liked. We'll be focusing as much as possible on independent designers. We'll be shining a light on smaller, non-newsy things we saw, like the wonderful Cini Boeri archive exhibit at a library in Parco Sempione we never knew existed? For now, though, here is our one roundup of 50 favorites.
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An Interview With Formafantasma, Whose Queer-Coded, Modernism-Inspired Solo Show Was the Best Thing We Saw at This Year’s Milan Fair

In the whirlwind of this year’s Salone, Formafantasma’s perfect solo show, La Casa Dentro — presented on the quiet second floor of the Fondazione ICA Milano — made us stop and catch our breath. La Casa Dentro (meaning The Home Within) is as much a collection of furniture and lighting as it is a meditation on design, memory, the familiar, and the uncanny. It conjures a dream state where the clinical feel of a medical office gives way to the comforts of an old family home (if your grandparents were the kind with an eye for stylish detail). Bent tubular metal forms are combined with embroideries and embellishments painted on wood, floral patterns, and silky decorative fabric. It's work that takes certain signifiers of the past and reanimates them in a new moment. Attempting to “queer the codes of Modernist design,” as the designers put it, the collection is as conceptually charged as it is materially stunning, and its theoretical considerations can’t be unraveled from personal and emotional ones.
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These 5 Installations in Milan Turned Materials Into the Main Event

I spent a lot of last week in Milan thinking about innovation in materials; in presentation after presentation, some of the best work to emerge from the fair came from materials companies who had hired A-plus designers to translate their raw product into something almost implausibly beautiful. From recycled aluminum to post-industrial plastic to a company that's asking us to reconsider the humble linoleum tile, here are five of our favorite materials-based projects from the week.
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This Milanese Brand — and Its Newest Collection, Just Launched in Milan — Brings the Maximalist Trend to Your Table

We noticed a funny little recurring motif at this week's Milan fair: At many of the gatherings we attended, we were served wine and/or water from the kind of frilly, classical goblets you might expect to find at a fancy summer garden party in Tuscany rather than in the middle of a big city known for its Modernist design. But maximalism has been on the rise in our world for awhile now, and the proof can be seen not just in our design-week drinkware but in the rise of brands like Sophie Lou Jacobsen, Gohar World, Levant, and the Milanese fashion and housewares label La DoubleJ, for whom frilly goblets are an enduring staple. La DoubleJ's founder J.J. Martin is known for her love of pattern-mixing, florals, vibrant colors, and all things old-school Italian, and the label's latest tabletop collection, Solar, embodies all those tendencies.
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10 Projects We Loved at the 2024 Collectible Fair in Brussels

The biggest news to come out of this month's Collectible fair, now in its seventh year, wasn't about a ground-breaking gallery or a new designer at all but rather the fact that the Brussels-based fair — much beloved in the design community for its rigorous curation and its commitment to highlighting emerging designers in the collectible field — will be debuting a show in New York this fall. From September 4-10, the inaugural US edition will take place inside the enigmatic WSA building in New York's financial district; it follows this year's successful westward expansion of Alcova into Miami. What can we say, we Americans love to shop! If you're the collecting kind, consider our round-up of the most interesting projects to come out of this year's Collectible fair in Brussels a preview of what's to come.
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All the Exhibitions, Projects, and Artworks We Loved From This Month’s 2024 Frieze Week in Los Angeles

Last week was Frieze week in L.A., the only time of year when the city provides art and design folks with a robust events schedule full of opportunities to repeatedly mingle with old friends and new, eat lots of free food, and of course, see great work. The action centers around the Frieze Los Angeles art fair itself, which just wrapped its especially color-soaked fifth edition, but at the same time encompasses the Felix Art Fair at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, the city's ever-growing roster of art and design galleries, and a host of other exhibitions and events that pop up around them.
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18 New Talents We Scouted at Greenhouse, Stockholm’s Showcase for Emerging Design

As an editor, each time I attend a design fair, I'm making snap judgements in my head: Does this designer's collection stand together as a whole? Is there a compelling narrative behind it? Does it use materials in a profound or creative way? Is it formally inventive? Is it pretty? If I had another suitcase, would I want to take a piece home with me? But before last week, I had never in my life had to choose my number one, absolute, hands-down favorite. And yet, at the Stockholm Furniture Fair's Greenhouse exhibition of emerging design, I did just that: For Sight Unseen's inaugural Best in Show award, I chose the Swedish duo Bursell/Svedborg — whose wonderful series of mixed-material pedestals we'll be diving into more in-depth next week — from a pool of 30 international design studios, who had been juried into the fair by a committee of six Stockholm-based designers. Today, though, I'm highlighting *all* of my favorite up-and-coming designers from the week.
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30 Projects We Loved at the 2024 Stockholm Furniture Fair

Perhaps no design fair makes me philosophize about the future of trade shows more than Stockholm. A small fair that has become even more compact over the past few years, as Danish brands have increasingly shifted their calendar to coincide with Copenhagen's 3 Days of Design, Stockholm tends to particularly shine in two areas that make a fair worth having in the first place: its curation — not only in booths but also in talks that one might actually care to attend — and the idea that sustainability ought to be baked in at every turn, or else what's the point of making new things?
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The 11 Best Things We Saw at This Year’s 2024 Fog Design+Art Fair in San Francisco

In January I finally attended the Fog Design+Art show for the first time. The design scene in SF seems to be picking up a bit these days, and we've been getting to know its talents — from interior designers like Studio Ahead and Michael Hilal to local furniture and object makers like Kate Greenberg, Caleb Ferris, and Ido Yoshimoto — so I figured it would be a good chance to both network with the locals and see what the out-of-towners were bringing to the fair itself. Here's everything I liked at the show(s).
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The 100 Best Things We Saw at Miami Art and Design Week 2023

The last time we physically attended Design Miami, believe it or not, was in 2014. We haven't ventured back since, in part because the party scene got so out of hand that it felt, in the end, like it was starting to eclipse the experience of actually seeing design and art. So we sat out the better part of the last decade, watching and collecting materials from the sidelines instead. This month was the first time we ventured back, and what we found was a completely transformed event: the glitz and fanfare were greatly diminished, while the work, particularly on the design side, seemed stronger than ever.
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Last Month’s Parisian Design Fairs Made Us Feel Open-Hearted and Optimistic About the Future of Design

Paris has been host to a lot of action over the last few months: Fashion Week, the World Rugby Cup, and a certain creepy crawly who shall not be named among them. During the second and third weeks of October, however, a flurry of design people — our people — popped into town for a fair circuit punctuated by the inaugural Paris edition from Design Miami/ as well as Paris+ par Art Basel and two exciting new kids on the block: CONTRIBUTIONS and THEMA.
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Move Over, Milan: This Naples-Based Fair Is Providing Young Designers a Prominent Platform

Milan’s Salone del Mobile might be the largest and best-known design event in Italy, but it’s by no means the be-all and end-all of the country’s creative scene. Case in point: EDIT Napoli, which held its fifth edition over three days at the beginning of October. Curated by Emilia Petruccelli and Domitilla Dardi, the design fair took place within the recently renovated cloisters, atriums and frescoed rooms of the Archivio di Stato di Napoli, the city’s historic State Archives building. There were several gems from emerging European talents, who have a better chance to shine at a smaller, more intimate fair like this one. Here are our picks from Naples.
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