VOGUE LIVING VIEW
Fashion designers are turning their hands to teacups, toasters and textiles to dress up our spaces.
Showy or sombre, practical or crazy, fashion designers are crossing the line from clothes to interior design. Dolce & Gabbana’s madcap Smeg kitchen appliances patterned with Sicilian motifs, Gucci’s outpouring of objects from creative director Alessandro Michele and Kenzo Takada’s new luxury home and lifestyle collection are just part of a growing story: in a world where conscientious shoppers are thinking about the wastefulness of ever-changing fashion, home is where the heart — and the art — is.
In Italy, enthusiasm has grown for the Salone del Mobile in Milan as the design world’s most sophisticated annual showcase. Yet this is a trend that has developed over half a century, not just a millennial moment when a new generation takes over.
Fashion creators have embraced the art of fine living since at least the 1960s when Emilio Pucci started to use his striking patterns for furniture as well as clothes. A new book, Unexpected Pucci, documents Pucci’s work in the area of art, ceramics and furniture. In the 1980s, new fashion designers took up the reins with Giorgio Armani in Italy and Ralph Lauren in the US.
Silvia Venturini Fendi insists that her mother, one of five sisters who all worked together, created the first fashion company to move from fur to furniture.
“Italian designers have been very successful and some pioneered the idea of homewares and interiors for Fendi in 1987,” says Venturini Fendi, who oversees the current range of Fendi Casa. The collections might be inspired by Italy’s Lake Como, with its lagoon blue interpreted as a velvet sofa; or by the nature reserves of Africa, resulting in rich brown materials for dark timber chairs.
“When I asked my mother why they started Casa, the answer was that, being a working woman, she wanted to bring the home to work!” says Venturini Fendi. “I guess this is related to the strong sense of family ties, which always begins at home.” ››
“In a world where shoppers are thinking about the wastefulness of ever-changing fashion, home is where the heart — and the art — is”
‹‹ Italian families traditionally pass down their skills to the next generation, including treasured family recipes. Francesco Maccapani Missoni, son of Angela and grandson of Rosita, is a good example. The Missoni Family Cookbook reveals Maccapani Missoni’s relationship not just to the fresh food that he loves to source, but also to how much the colours and textures of fresh food are woven into the fashion business.
“My mother’s home has storerooms full of jewel-like coloured crystal glasses, crazy patterned ’50s ceramics, brightly painted tableware, and coloured embroidered tablecloths from all over the world,” says Maccapani Missoni. “Her house is like an Aladdin’s cave of accessories for fantastical dinner parties.” Whimsical geometric drawings, napkins with angular lines, and vivid garden tables are all traceable to the knitted sweaters at the heart of the Missoni brand.
Gucci has had an extraordinary rebirth under Alessandro Michele, highlighted by the 2017 launch of his playful pieces for the home. From vivid velvet furniture to serpents crawling over cushions, the collection — named Gucci Décor — is designed to bring Michele’s eclectic, romantic aesthetic into the home, right down to teacups and incense holders.
Just as Gucci’s fashion and accessories are designed by Italian artisans, so are the objects for the home — the porcelain, for example, is produced by the Florentine company Richard Ginori. From whimsical teddy bear patterns to armchairs inspired by ’50s Hollywood, Gucci has stepped from its original saddle business to show business.
A similar story comes from Dolce & Gabbana, as its dresses with curvy shapes and bold patterns tell stories of the Sicily so loved by Domenico and Stefano. Translated into products for Smeg, the bold kitchenware — flower-patterned kettles and hand-painted food mixers — electrify this usually stolid area.
It is hard to find an Italian fashion brand without a connection to home furnishing. It’s the case even when a designer comes from outside — like Brit Daniel Lee to Bottega Veneta, who will launch his home collection in an area first expressed by previous incumbent Tomas Maier.
Why do Italian fashion designers embrace so eagerly the wider world of design? Carlo Capasa, president of the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, puts forward three suggestions.
“The Salone del Mobile has become so important that people want to be part of it,” he says. “Italian designers see homewares as an extension of fashion. And remember that ‘home’ is very important to Italians.”
Globally, fashion designers who embrace homewares divide neatly into two categories: architecture and decoration. The first comes as The Row, with its streamlined stores from designers Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen; Loewe, where Irish-born Jonathan Anderson has injected into the Spanish brand a design rigour inspired by his love of modernist and contemporary art; and Hermès, with its ultra-elegant objects that were originally inspired by the work of the late architect Rena Dumas from the brand’s founding family. Would she be surprised to know that Hermès is now offering down-to-earth gardening tools?
The second comes as home fashion via aesthetics informed by both place and personality. Clean, modern fashion lines suggest northern climes, rather than Mediterranean heat for instance. Significantly, the Belgian designer Raf Simons, after being creative director at Dior in Paris and later Calvin Klein in New York, turned to Scandinavia and Danish fabric house Kvadrat to collaborate on creating textiles with texture.
“I was fascinated by how the colouration and weaving processes in fashion textiles don’t have the same limitations as those of furnishing textiles,” Simons explains about working with Kvadrat. “Because of the dense weave that is needed for furniture, the colouration becomes even more interesting, with an almost painterly impact.”
A former fashion designer who also looks north is Lars Nilsson. Stockholm-born Nilsson has gone back to his roots after spending his fashion life in Milan for Gianfranco Ferré, in New York for Bill Blass, and in Paris for Christian Lacroix, John Galliano and Nina Ricci.
Now Nilsson is applauded for his Vandra Rugs collection with sophisticated geometric lines on fabrics that have a linear depth. He describes it as “a textured mix between Scandinavian nature and urban life”, weaving wool, linen and undyed sheep fleece.
Of the many fashion offerings moving to the home, my favourite is Wes Gordon’s tableware for Carolina Herrera. For a celebratory dinner at London’s Wallace Collection, the creative director laid out decorative tablecloths and china that looked as perfectly at home in a museum as they would for country life. So, what is the real appeal of designer-led furnishings? A cynic might suggest that it is either a way to extend the brand — or a way to paste an already known name on new products. But fashion is so often a bellwether for social change. I believe that a wake-up call of a climate emergency is pushing flashy fashion aside with thoughtful designers looking into heart and home.