Sunnei and cc-tapis Just Dropped the Ultimate Fashion x Design Collab, Where Carpets Become Clothing and Vice Versa

In addition to their playfully chic sartorial offerings, Sunnei has been on our radar for years thanks to their periodic overlaps with the design world, from a thoughtful ongoing object collection to the collaboration they presented during Salone in 2022 with our friends at Bloc Studios. And yet I was still surprised and delighted when, after I emailed the brand's PR team asking for a press kit for the brand's FW24 fashion show, it turned out the striking striped knitwear pieces that I'd immediately been drawn to were actually a collaboration with one of our other favorite Milanese brands, rug-maker cc-tapis.
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Inspired by a Children’s Poem, Giopato & Coombes’ Milan Exhibition Took Visitors on a Journey Through Memory

The children’s poem Il Cosario describes finding forgotten small items collected in pockets and looking at them with fresh eyes. Italian-British design duo Giopato & Coombes initially bought this poem for their son, but they kept a copy at their workstation because they found it so inspiring. When the time came, they used the process outlined in the poem's verses to guide 18 Pockets, an exhibition during the recent Milan Design Week that presented reimagined pieces from the pair’s back catalog and ideas that had yet to be realized, combined in multiple ways to help tell the designers’ personal stories. A journey through their own memories, you could say.
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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.
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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.
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A Young, Milan-Based Designer Inspired by the Brutalist Architecture of Eastern Europe

There are two distinct threads that run through the work of Milan-based, Macedonia-born designer Daniel Nikolovski. The first is a penchant for storytelling. His objects and furniture all seem to point to an obscure reference or emerge from a well-thought-out backstory; the forms that make up his EYE Lamps, for example, were inspired by Yugoslavian monuments, like the Brutalist buildings Kenzo Tange constructed in Nikolovski’s hometown of Skopje following an earthquake that decimated the city in 1963. The other major tenet of his work is craftsmanship, which is actually the reason he ended up in Italy at all.
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Milanese Set Designer Elena Mora Has Perfected the Surreal

If you followed the now-defunct Icon Design Italy in its final few years, you would know exactly who Elena Mora is. The Milanese set designer and interior stylist’s cinematic spreads were always a highlight of the Italian design magazine. Recognizable for her lush use of color and irreverent bordering on surreal scenarios, Mora’s work is always so much more than just a product round-up.
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Meet Cara\Davide, The South African-Italian Duo Making Waves in Milan

One of Cara Judd and Davide Gramatica of Cara\Davide’s most memorable projects quite literally started in a scrap heap. “We were visiting an artisan who works with metal for another project and we came across a piece of leftover iron with an interesting patina,” says Gramatica of the offcut that would inspire their Calandra collection. “For them, it was rubbish, but between us, we said, why not?”
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female italian designer The Ladies Room

These Four Women Are Leading Milan’s Design Scene — Both Together and Apart

This July, a design show in a Parisian apartment harnessed the talents of what feels like at least half of Milan’s up-and-coming design scene. Called "You Are Welcome" by The Ladies' Room collective — a collaborative project made up of Agustina Bottoni, Ilaria Bianchi, Sara Ricciardi, and Astrid Luglio — the show took the form of an intimate, female-centered salon, where objects vibrated with their own peculiar presences. All brilliant designers in their own right, the four have been working together since 2016 when they met at the Turin-based design fair Operae.
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Week of August 5, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, two cases of ceramic lamp love, a collection of stoneware vases that defy imagination, and a Milanese apartment that feels like time-traveling.
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Italian interiors stylist Greta Cevenini

Meet Greta Cevenini, The Best Italian Interiors Stylist You’ve Never Heard Of

Greta Cevenini has been quietly circling behind the scenes of the Italian design world for the past few years, styling lookbooks for Spotti and cc-tapis and envisioning spreads for Icon Design; she most recently took the helm for Cassina’s new catalogue, which was released during Salone. Her work is quiet — cool and rich with light-touch visual references well before they become ubiquitous, leaning more on texture and subtle color variations rather than dramatic, scene-stealing statements.
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You’ll Never Guess Which European Metropolis Inspired Svenja Deininger’s Latest Body of Work

Sometimes the reason you are drawn to one piece of art or another is obvious. In the case of Viennese artist Svenja Deininger — who opens "Crescendo," her third solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, this Thursday — we could say it is because her work falls somewhere pleasingly on the spectrum between figurative and abstract. At its most abstract, it resembles the color-field painters we espouse so heartily on this site; at its most figurative, there is something almost Hockney-esque about her canvases. But sometimes the reason you are drawn to one piece of art or another reveals itself to you only later.
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