Imagination and discovery are at the core of Danese Milano’s new summer series of objects. The design brand has collaborated with designer Michele De Lucchi on colourful puzzles, and also reissued Enzo Mari's classic 16 Animali/ Pesci wooden puzzles from 1957. Both projects with clear educational missions, each is conceived to invite hands-on exploration.

Design gets playful at Danese Milano

De Lucchi’s graphic and architectural language is captured in his two projects: La Fattoria di Chele and the Chele Puzzle. In the first, eight farm animals – playful and expressive creatures that reflect De Lucchi’s sketching style – emerge from cut-out slots in Chilean pine panels.

In this contemporary nod to Enzo Mari’s animal puzzles, each creature is cut from a single 9mm-thick wooden circle and is as much decorative object as play thing.

Equally tactile, the Chele Puzzle is a composition tool, comprising colourful shapes and forms from De Lucchi’s sketches, which users are encouraged to arrange to create imaginary animals and environments. Made from cardboard, the puzzle is designed to be durable and portable.

Danese Milano has also relaunched classic designs by Enzo Mari: 16 Animali and 16 Pesci. Both are centred on a single continuous cut that generates 16 different figures from one piece of wood. These little characters all slot together to fill the puzzle's wooden housing, or playfully stack on top of each other.

These four projects mark a championing of classic ideas of play, encouraging independent imagination and creativity, while in turn reducing over-stimulation – minimal, considered design that’s also fun.

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Gebrüder Thonet Vienna (GTV), the Viennese and Turin-based furniture manufacturer, is reissuing Enzo Mari’s ‘Boomerang’ desk for Salone del Mobile 2025, and you don’t need to be a furniture historian to be delighted by its return. The desk, which Mari originally designed for GTV in 2001, is a friendly, winking piece of furniture for the office or home – or home office. Mari may have been one of the more outspoken renegades of the Italian Maestri, but his legacy of nearly 2000 works over 60 active years, is united by an enduring endearment.

The ‘Boomerang’ is self-evident: a curved glass surface rests on a boomerang-shaped beechwood plank, supported by four rounded legs. There is a child-like charm to the design but, like so much of Mari’s work, the desk’s simplicity belies its cleverness and warmth. By warmth, we mean specifically here the embrace of the curve, which holds its worker gently. This is not the power desk of a 1960s ad man or a 1980s yuppy. It has a democratic quality – a transparent surface – and the effect is to make its occupant approachable, perfect for receiving guests with the gentlest hint of authority, but not intimidating them. The clever people at GTV will likely have felt that it makes the perfect desk for a home office, which of course we are all seeking these days.

‘Play is not meant to pass the time, but to understand the world,’ Mari wrote. True to his words, he used a light touch to make serious statements about the ills of the design industry – its greed and consumerist gumption. One of Mari’s most celebrated projects was his ‘Autoprogettazione?’ tract from 1974 – a manual with instructions for building one’s own simple furniture from readily accessible materials. Mari sent the manual for free to anyone who wrote to him. The premise and promise of open source design lives on.

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Earlier this year, Sabato De Sarno, who was appointed creative director of Gucci in 2023, initiated his first furniture collection for the Florentine house: five 20th-century Italian design classics, remade in ‘Ancora’ red, the rich, oxblood hue which appeared as part of his debut runway collection and has become a symbol of his tenure so far. They included pieces by Nanda Vigo, Gae Aulenti, Piero Castiglioni, Mario Bellini, Tobia Scarpa and Piero Portaluppi, spanning sofas, rugs and a chest of drawers.

‘Design objects have always been a source of inspiration for me, especially when it comes to icons,’ De Sarno told Wallpaper* at the time. ‘I have discovered them, observed them, collected them. I have explored their stories.’

Gucci reissues an Enzo Mari design classic

This past week in Milan, De Sarno added to his roster of ‘Ancora’ red reissues the ‘Timor’ perpetual calendar by Italian designer Enzo Mari, designed in 1967 for Danese, which served as the invitation to Gucci’s S/S 2025 womenswear runway show on Friday afternoon (20 September 2024). Delivered to guests in an ‘Ancora’ red box, the unique invitation also featured a Gucci motif on its body (a miniature cardboard invitation inside saved guests having to transport the calendar to the venue).

De Sarno chose the object – a curving plastic design, out of which the days, weeks and months of the year fan outwards – to reflect the collection’s starting point, which was about capturing ‘a precise moment in time... a moment to seize and live to the fullest’. ‘It’s the moment the sun dives into the sea at the end of a day,’ he continued. ‘It’s the moment we find ourselves. This collection is a tribute to those moments, and an invitation to stop, seek your own moment.’

Held at the Triennale Milano museum, the city’s temple to design – where a recent Enzo Mari retrospective curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist took place – the show’s runway was evocative of a setting sun, comprising a series of rooms which moved from yellow to orange to ‘Ancora’ red. Meanwhile the collection itself captured what De Sarno called a ‘casual grandeur’, instilling everyday garments with joyful moments of craft, colour and embellishment – from smatterings of crystals to beaded tassels and lace.

Read our review of the show, and discover more from Milan Fashion Week S/S 2025, here.

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Italian designer Enzo Mari died in Milan on Monday 19 October at the age of 88. A designer as well as an artist, critic and theorist, Mari has been an inspiration and reference point for several generations of designers and design entrepreneurs, and his radical ideas have helped shape contemporary design and still have an impact today.

Mari was born in 1932 in Cerano, in the Piedmont region of Italy, and moved to Milan in 1947 taking on a variety of jobs before enrolling at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in 1952. There, he studied art and literature, with a particular interest in the psychology of vision, the planning of perceptive structures and the methodology of design.

In the late 1950s he met entrepreneur Bruno Danese (who with wife Jacqueline Vodoz launched the eponymous design brand described as ‘long-term project to bring art into everyday life’, changing the face of industrial design), an encounter that helped form Mari’s career as a designer.

With Danese, Mari created one of his best known and loved pieces, the ‘16 Animali’ wooden puzzle. From a single piece of oak wood, Mari designed 16 animals through one continuous cut, an object that was inspired by his research into Scandinavian children’s toys, and his own children. Each animal is designed as an object of its own, also fitting neatly within a minimalist puzzle structure: an exercise in formal creativity.

During his 60-year career, Mari went on to conceive over 1500 designs for companies such as Danese, Driade, Artemide, Zanotta and Magis, as well as illustrations, books with Einaudi and Bollati Boringhieri and imaginative works for children now edited by Italian publisher Corraini.

Some of his best known objects include the Putrella tray for Danese, intuitively created from a bent industrial I-bar, an archetypal shape in which Mari recognised an expressive potential. Another iconic piece he designed for Danese in 1966 is the Timor perpetual calendar, a graphic tool that represents his practical approach to creation. Made of plastic cards fixed to a central pivot, the design was inspired by railway signs and long-lasting functionality. Swiss architect Max Bill said that Mari thought creatively and built logically, a fitting description of the duality of his oeuvre.

Although Mari was perhaps more intuitively known for his designs, it is his ideas which make him one of the most radical, revolutionary thinkers of his generation. Mari’s own political views veered towards communism, something that he made sure to be reflected in his work. He saw design as a democratic utopia, a designer’s responsibility towards its community. He claimed that his work was aimed at creating a better world, by looking at future scenarios that he would tackle with his projects.

His political ideas were reflected in his definition of ‘good design’, which he described as sustainable, accessible, functional, well made, emotionally resonant, enduring, socially beneficial, beautiful, economic and affordable.

A project which is perhaps Mari’s most referenced idea and a fitting demonstration of his thinking is the Proposta per un'Autoprogettazione (proposal for a self-design) series. A 1974 book presented as an instruction manual to create furniture simply using rough boards and nails, Autoprogettazione represented an economical way to produce furniture while sharing knowledge and creating awareness of the act of making.

Mari closed his studio in 2014, but his impact has always been tangible within the design industry and among creatives from all fields. His creative power was celebrated through a 2020 exhibition at Milan’s Triennale Design Museum. Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Francesca Giacomelli, the exhibition offered both an in-depth overview of his work but also an opportunity for artists and designers to pay tribute to his impact. Contributions from the likes of artists Rirkrit Tiravanija, Danh Vō, the late designer Nanda Vigo, and designer Virgil Abloh among many others made it clear that Mari’s contributions to the creative industries have been far-reaching, and that his legacy will live on.

Jewellery designed by artists and architects always offers intriguing, unexpected results.  But even as this niche has regained popularity throughout the past several years in Paris, it remains strangely underexposed in Italy. That may change thanks to an ambitious new exhibit that has just opened at Milan’s Fragile gallery. Entitled Designati alla Bellezza ('Designed for Beauty'), the exhibit is curated by Paola Berra, who has spent years informally unearthing artist and architect-designed jewellery as she amassed mid-century furniture and design pieces at Fragile, which first opened in 2000.

'Suddenly, I realised I had a lot of great pieces,' says Berra of her growing jewellery arsenal.  'When I actually started purposefully looking around, I found many more.' Designed for Beauty features the work of 12 different artists, including designers such as Enzo Mari and Ettore Sottsass, sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro, painter Alba Polenghi Lisca, and architects like Andrea Branzi and Alessandro Mendini, none of which – Berra adds – would have ever agreed to a group show. 'They really are all such individual talents,' she explains.  'I started this show just by collecting pieces and then finding collectors, not by working with the artists themselves.'

Though many are small and diminutive, the pieces are all powerful upon closer inspection. German artist Karl Heinz Reister’s collages of ceramic steel and gold on a ring and matching cuff stand with refined sophistication while the 3D nest-like gold bangle and matching earrings designed by artist Giorgio Vigna have an architectural edge. There are exceptionally beautiful (and quasi minimal!) gold dangling geometric earrings by Sottsass, an intriguing silver mesh scarf with gold fringe designed by artist Giancarlo Montebello and best of all, a breastplate necklace composted of silver tubes by Arnaldo Pomodoro that graces the exhibit’s catalog cover.

'Jewellery by artists is really an area that developed in the 1970s,' says Berra.  'But then it kind of disappeared. It’s coming back now as many of the first collectors are in the 1980s now and want to sell. They realise they have these very important pieces in their collections. Most of these works are very hidden and have never been seen.'

INFORMATION
Designed for Beauty runs until 15 December, 2015

ADDRESS

Fragile
Via San Damiano, 2
20121 Milano

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Last year, Italian company Driade enlisted architect David Chipperfield to curate the brand’s artistic direction. The first steps included introducing new designers to the collection and redesigning the Milanese showroom, now an all-white sculptural space.

As well as contributing product design for the brand, Chipperfield also introduced Driade’s inaugural Image Book, a photographic volume which presents the new pieces as well as furniture from the permanent collection through the art direction of John Morgan. To emphasise the continuity between past, present and future, the latest crop of Konstantin Grcic’s shelves were presented alongside archive pieces by the likes of Nanda Vigo and Marco Zanuso, while the book also includes Driade staples such as Fredrikson Stallard’s 'Basalt' collection and new pieces by design giant Enzo Mari.

Eschewing a standard catalogue style, the pieces, all with a strong sense of modernity and creative flair, were photographed by Berlin-based photographer Simon Menges against the suggestive backdrop of a stone quarry outside Verona.

‘Since its beginnings in 1968, Driade has, through its selection of designers and through the development of objects and furniture, represented a particular attitude, encouraging innovation and individuality, and enjoying a spirit of design diversity,’ says Chipperfield, who since taking the helm of the company has been quietly directing it while celebrating its roots. ‘Going forward, it is the intention of Driade to maintain its contribution to this culture and to continue to develop the generous balance between the individuality of the designer and the lose coherence and perspective so brilliantly determined by [founders] Adelaide Acerbi, Antonia Astori, and Enrico Astori.'

Hermès has appeared at the Salone del Mobile for the first time ever, signalling a definitive entrance back into the furniture market after a considerable hiatus away. Launching its brand new contemporary interiors collection in Milan's La Pelota in via Palermo, the luxury brand made a statement of serious intent by the headline commissioning of architects Shigeru Ban and his partner Jean de Gastines to create the specially conceived space.

Ban and de Gastines, who worked together on the Centre Pompidou-Metz, were a natural choice for Hermès' creative director Pierre-Alexis Dumas, and Pavillion Hermès, structured with cardboard tubes woven with paper, is essentially a nomadic structure with a modular core. The interior space has been constructed to be intimate, with ceiling height and area size varying from room to room.

Simple and minimally-embellished, the space - rather than being an overwhelming display of architectural might - works to reflect on the craft on show, such as eight pieces originally designed by Jean-Michel Frank in the 1920s which were reissued by the house in November last year.

Also making their debut was a furniture set for the office and dining room by Enzo Mari, and a line of living room furniture by Antonio Citterio. Denis Montel, artistic director of long-time Hermès collaborator and interior agency RDAI, has also co-designed the collection's signature chair with Eric Benqué, while also on show were furnishing fabrics and wallpapers brought out through Hermes' joint venture with Italian textile firm, Dedar.