Conie Vallese and Super Yaya’s beribboned bronze furniture is dressed to impress

Milan Design Week 2025 was packed with ‘fashion meets furniture’ moments – many of them big, ostentatious, and trailed by hour-long queues that wrapped around the block. One quieter, but no less compelling, installation was tucked away in a space off the rooftop terrace of Villa Bagatti as part of the Alcova 2025 showcase. There, Argentine artist and designer Conie Vallese joined forces with Lebanese-Ivorian fashion designer Rym Beydoun, founder of Super Yaya, on a series of bronze furniture pieces adorned with intricate floral motifs – Vallese’s signature (also seen in her Elhanati jewellery and jewelled cutlery collaborations) – enhanced by hand-dyed ribbons in soft pastels by Beydoun.

The collaboration builds on Super Yaya’s A/W 2025 collection, ‘Sans-Soleil’, where fabric was explored as both form and movement through delicate, layered bands that wrapped the human body. Here, those same gestures are transferred from the body to bronze furniture.

Titled ‘Softness and Strength’, the series includes a chair and two tables, each draped with long textile strips that extend beyond the furniture's surfaces – falling from seats, grazing the floor, and subtly shifting the silhouettes they touch.

We spoke with Conie Vallese to find out more…

Wallpaper*: How did the collaboration with Rym Beydoun of Super Yaya come about?

Conie Vallese: Rym was in the midst of developing her A/W 2025 collection ‘Sans Soleil’ when I approached her with the idea of a collaboration. We met in Paris a few years ago and I instantly felt a connection and appreciation for her work. For this, it naturally made sense to her to extend the [collection's] visual language to my pieces – dressing them with similar intention, using the techniques and colour palette already in dialogue within her own collection.

W*: What was the creative process like, and how did your design languages respond to or influence one another?

CV: There was an intuitive alignment from the start. Rym's approach to textile and surface echoed the essence of the forms I was developing. Rather than imposing one practice onto the other, we let the materials speak to each other, her textile interventions amplified the emotional tone of the bronze works, and my pieces, in turn, offered a new kind of structure for her expressions. It felt like a mutual conversation rather than a layering of two separate languages.

W*: Your mediums, bronze and textile, naturally carry opposing qualities. What deeper ideas or emotional resonances were you hoping to express through this interplay?

CV: The contrast between bronze and textile beautifully embodied the name of the show: 'Softness and Strength'. That duality became the emotional core of the collaboration. The hardness of bronze met the fluidity of textile, creating a tension that felt deeply poetic.

W*: What made Villa Bagatti the right setting for this work?

CV: Villa Bagatti's atmosphere offered the perfect counterpoint – raw, textured, yet full of warmth. The room created beautiful dialogues and feelings through the different lights of the day. The interplay between indoor and outdoor spaces, shadow and light, created a rhythm that echoed our work. It didn't feel clinical or minimal; it was grounded, generous, and quietly majestic, the kind of space that holds history without overpowering the present.

W*: Do you see this as the beginning of an ongoing dialogue between your practices?

CV: It's possible. We both often collaborate with other creatives. What's meaningful is the freedom these collaborations allow. In this case, the dialogue felt open, fluid, and full of potential.

super-yaya.com
@conievallese

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