Meet the NYC Art Collective Who Brought Their Explorations of “Vaguely Asian” Identities to Milan

Comprising four New York City–based artists, the collective CFGNY employs an unruly creative output to assert their own lived experience of being what they call “vaguely Asian” in America. The group recently staged an exhibition called Emporium during last month’s Milan furniture fair — presented by Italian leather brand Marséll and curated by PIN-UP magazine’s Felix Burrichter — that employs cardboard, porcelain, and leather to further complicate this idea of a blurry Asian-ness. The sculptures created with Marséll especially for the show, like leather-wrapped replicas of architectural details from Milan’s Chinatown, elucidate contact points between cultures and identity groups.
More

The Best of Salone Del Mobile 2023, Part II

Today we're focusing on brands: We loved the collection at Cassina — though it was hard to see through the throngs — and the brand's iMaestri exhibition, in a former bank vault, curated by Patricia Urquiola against a backdrop of blood red. Other standouts included a quiet presentation of lovely geometric rugs by Ruckstuhl at Assab One, Studiopepe's shock of lime green coffee table for Sancal, the addition of two friends of SU to the Tacchini stable (Umberto Bellardi Ricci and Brian Thoreen), Phillippe Malouin's cheeky magnetic lamp for Flos, Knoll's desert jungle pavilion, Acerbis's 1970s throwback in the form of a John Chamberlain-esque sofa system by Claudio Salocchi, and the debut of one of our favorite lamps — Mangiarotti's Lari lamp for Karakter — in a new, tiny, USB-charged portable size. 
More

The Best of the 2023 Salone Del Mobile — Part I

While Salone del Mobile has often felt too sprawling for one person to take in, this was the year it seemed to fracture entirely. Scrolling through other people's Instagram Stories, seeing exhibitions that hadn't even made it onto my radar, much less my extensive Google doc, made me stop and wonder: "Are we even at the same fair?" The exhibition we loved the most though — and heard uniformly wonderful things about — was by Objects of Common Interest, who developed their experiments in opalescent resin into a full-fledged collection for Nilufar Depot, so we'll kick off our Milan recaps with that!
More

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today: Campo Base

This week we're featuring our favorite quick-hits from this year's Milan Design Week. Our pick for today's post is a powerhouse collective of six Italian studios that have teamed up to self-produce a series of six rooms that act as a "manifesto on contemporary interior design."
More

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today: India Mahdavi for Gebrüder Thonet Vienna

This week we're featuring our favorite quick-hits from this year's Milan Design Week. This is a simple one, but we just felt drawn to the stylish weirdness of India Mahdavi's new Loop dining chair for Gebrüder Thonet Vienna, which takes the heritage brand's historical tubular bent-wood frame style and turns it into something modern, playful but not silly, and with one of the best two-tone color schemes we've seen in awhile.
More

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today: Norwegian Presence

This week we're featuring our favorite quick hits from this year's Milan Design Week. First up is the ninth annual edition of Norwegian Presence, a group exhibition of work by some of the Nordic country's best talents, curated by Design and Architecture Norway (DOGA) and, this year, styled by Kråkvik & D’Orazio and Bjørn van den Berg.
More