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Discovering Salvatori and The Carrara Marble Quarries

Our visit to the Tuscan marble district with Gabriele Salvatori

Paolo Ferrarini

13 February 2024

As a material, marble has defined architecture and design, art forms and historic periods. We stepped into this world first-hand when we visited the Carrara marble quarries, the surrounding Tuscan lands, and the Salvatori company. Guido Salvatori founded his namesake company in 1946 in the small town of Querceta, a few kilometers from the Northern Tuscan coast and not far from the world-famous Carrara quarries. Salvatori is now run by third-generation family members who have transformed the company from a small local business into a flourishing internationally-renowned brand, recognized for its love for craftsmanship, its close relationship with design and experimentation around innovative processes.

Salvatori’s elective materials are natural stones and marbles, including Bianco Carrara, Gris du Marais and limestone. The brand focuses on a small color palette that ranges from white to black, cream, light gray and dark gray. This is mainly for a technical reason: these materials withstand processing under blades, a technology that distinguishes the company from peers. That said, Salvatori also produces small, colorful objects, such as the photo frames and vases of the new Precioso collection by American designer Stephen Burks.

CEO Gabriele Salvatori loves design, as demonstrated by the Burks collaboration, as well as partnerships with Michael Anastassiades, Kengo Kuma, Piero Lissoni, John Pawson, Yabu Pushelberg, Patricia Urquiola, Vincent Van Duysen and many more. 

“A beautiful project originates from a great designer sitting at the same table alongside a great craftsman,” Salvatori tells us. “The craftsman puts the experience on the plate, and the designer brings a naive, unpolluted eye that helps you look sideways. It comes as if the designer were a child who turned things upside down.”

Color and collaboration aside, Salvatori’s specialty is the processing of white Carrara marble. To reach the quarries, we venture onto dirt roads full of curves, stones and white dust. Once at the top, we are captured by the majesty of the Apuan Alps mountain range and the centuries-old work that dug them. Their intrinsic value is such that, since 2011, the Tuscan Mining Park has been part of the UNESCO Global Geopark network. That’s not to mention all the Renaissance sculpture masterpieces that were made with this marble, and the great artists that we all know came here in person to choose the best blocks. Today, this work is coordinated by a consortium and carried out in 150 quarries by skilled workers who work with gigantic machinery as well as their bare hands.

White marble is primarily mainly for sculpture and architecture but has several other usages. It is, in fact, a very precious material made up of 95% calcium carbonate. It is expensive, porous and easy to work with; it is used for cosmetics, toothpaste, paint and even dietary supplements. We ask our guide if the material that is likely to run out. “I don’t think so,” he tells us, “we are digging at over 1000 meters above sea level, but below us, the marble reaches up to three kilometers below sea level. Since the ancient Roman times, we have only scratched the surface.”

Back at the Salvatori factory, we visit production. Here, we observe the many steps that are meticulously executed by hand. The colors of the stones, which may seem the same to an inexperienced eye, actually have variations in hue. For large orders, it becomes necessary to maintain a uniformity of color, and until now, only human experience allowed this.

Salvatori says this may change. “For the white Carrara, one of our specialized craftsmen comes to make 23 to 24 choices of tones with their naked eye. We are nerds, but after eight hours of this work, even the human eye goes haywire. This is why we have been studying AI for years and, in recent times, also generative AI. This is a passion of mine,” he says.

Neural networks can also come in handy in the design process of a traditional material. “We also know Midjourney well, but it’s the tip of the iceberg,” Salvatori says. “I don’t want to tell you that AI will draw me the next texture, but it will give me a great hand in visualizing an idea without wasting time and material for prototyping. Maybe it can give me some ideas, like that ‘looking sideways’ that maybe will make me find something that I like that we can then develop.”

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Discovering Istanbul’s Sanayi313

Architect Enis Karavil speaks about the ideas behind his design studio, concept store and restaurant

Paolo Ferrarini

18 January 2024

Istanbul’s identity is derived from the coexistence of contrasts. Luxury and simplicity, craftsmanship and industry, sophistication and roughness; these alternate constantly. Such a mix defines Sanayi313, a concept store that combines contemporary design and vintage pieces, industrial architecture and food culture, visionary creativity and preservation of tradition. An architecture studio, store and restaurant inhabit this unique space, all distinguished by an industrial aesthetic woven with natural elements.

Sanayi313—which is the Turkish word for industry, followed up the street number of the venue—was co-founded in 2014 by two brothers, architect Enis Karavil and entrepreneur Amir Karavil. Enis lived in London for many years, but when he decided to return to his hometown, he wanted a place that could express his vision. The location plays a crucial role in understanding the project. The Maslak district, a very central area not far from the shopping streets, is characterized by dozens of car repair shops. From here, visitors can see the skyscrapers of the nearby business district while immersed in a maze of streets filled with warehouses—a view reminiscent of New York’s Meatpacking District in the 1990s or London’s South Bank in the early 2000s.

“When I moved back to Istanbul, I had a hard time explaining myself to my clients because what we do is not something you can easily explain,” Enis tells COOL HUNTING. “I wanted a space to create a world that could explain me. I came to this area and I met with a few artists. I liked their spaces a lot, and then I found this place. I took it the moment I saw it and thought this was where I could make my dreams come true. But everybody was making fun of me because they insisted there’s no luxury there, and that no one who can afford my accessories or food would come.”

The gamble proved successful and today Sanayi313 stands as a symbol of the neighborhood’s rebirth. But the beginnings were challenging. “When I decided to move forward,” Enis continues, “I thought design is not enough; the experience should cover all six senses. We want to explain ourselves with different disciplines: food, aroma and design. When clients come here to have lunch, we have a shop; they see it and get it. The shop is a way to show who we are, what we like, what kind of accessories we can have.”

Besides vintage pieces such as clocks, stationery and desk items, you can find Sanayi313’s own items. Their range includes leather cases, high-quality notebooks and unusual accessories like flycatchers. Enis explains this approach, “While building our object selection, I thought some pieces were missing, so I wanted to produce them. And we have a little leather collection that I thought more people could afford. It’s vital to reach different crowds that can afford different things.”

In addition to designing private homes, shops and public spaces with their architectural practice, Enis and his staff produce a furniture line that includes tables and more, often made to measure or adapted according to customer requirements. New objects exist alongside historical pieces from all over the world.

Their signature line is, unsurprisingly, made in Turkey. “For furniture, we have our own workshop in Turkey, and everything is handmade,” Enis says. “One of my goals is to show the rest of the world how good our manufacturing is the skills, and how many different types of woodworking and upholstery we have. I’m trying to show the rest of the world that we have authentic original designs, designers and workshops.”

Enis succeeds in providing the unexpected. “People come here, and they just think it’s a restaurant,” he says. “They get in, and they’re in shock. I like that moment when the wow factor is kicking in. I really enjoy creating contrast. Here, there’s an industrial and luxury zone; there’s black and white, antiques and new things. That contrast creates design.”

Sanayi313 also publishes a magazine entitled Paper. The magazine’s paper is of very high quality, and the articles include city profiles, photo reports, interviews with architects and designers, exhibition reviews and even recipes. It’s a curatorial project, as Enis underscores, “The magazine is a way of reaching people. We started to sell in London and the United States. It’s an opportunity to let people know my company and design philosophy—because you can’t send leather goods to everyone, and not everyone can buy them.”

There’s no denying that the concept shop’s 2014 arrival has benefited the entire neighborhood. Even today, machine shops are the most visible presence on these streets, but in addition to Sanayi313, creative spaces such as the PG Art Gallery have proliferated. During our tour of the area, we took part in the opening of an exhibition and admired works by Cansu Sönmez and Derya Geylani Vuruşan. The participants’ energy was truly contagious, and the vibe—much like at Sanayi313—was that of a promising future.

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Crash Baggage Introduces Quiet, Cushioned “Lunar Wheels”

The Italian luggage brand has patented a new wheel that reduces noise and annoyance

Paolo Ferrarini

14 December 2023

Luggage is a challenging object to design: aesthetics and function must converse and every detail, including the wheels, can make a substantial difference. Crash Baggage knows this all too well. Francesco Pavia, the brand’s founder and CEO, had the foresight to design a rigid suitcase that was pre-dented—so that travelers wouldn’t worry if it got damaged on the road. Recently, Pavia also introduced Lunar, an extremely easy-to-use, cushioned wheel. A small pneumatic tire, Lunar limits the noise produced by wheels and even absorbs vibrations. It aims to remove the annoying noise from roller suitcases that disturbs quiet in historic cities like Venice, where the brand was born.

We tested a cabin-size Crash Baggage piece, equipped with Lunar wheels, for a few months. The overall experience was beyond satisfactory in every city: Rome, Como, Bologna, Milan, Istanbul, Stockholm. At the airport, the luggage is maneuverable; at train stations, they overcomes obstacles well. As for city centers, they are hushed on cobblestones, not quite like on the moon (as their name implies), but almost. Compared to the high-pitched racket of a classic hard suitcase, we felt light-years ahead—and there was no feeling of that guilt that often accompanies arriving at night with noisy luggage.

After experiencing Lunar, we met Pavia at the brand’s headquarters, a recently renovated ancient palace a few kilometers away from Venice, to learn more.

How did Crash Baggage come about?

It all started in high school when I was beginning to feel the need to do something important. My father sensed this and decided to take me with him on a trip to China. I began to get in touch with the manufacturing world to see what luggage was and how the product was created. It was a shock initially because I’m highly creative, and that world was very static.

Around 2010, you had an epiphany: remove the thought of ruining your suitcase by traveling with an already ruined, dented suitcase.

You often leave your suitcase in the hands of the airlines. They go through many hands, and pass through many machines. And what usually happens? When you arrive and retrieve your luggage, something bad has happened. So often, people get angry because their luggage was ruined, or it was poorly treated.

I had the intuition that if it’s already dented, we’ve solved all the problems. People are already prepared for the damage, and at the same time, the beating gives a certain aesthetic and emotionality to a product that didn’t have it already.

I found myself trying to make an initial prototype. I started heating the plastic with a heat blower to recreate the bumps as naturally as possible. I started from the corners, giving them different sizes, trying to harmonize the bumps. Once it was finished, it was as if this suitcase had begun to speak for itself. It had started to express itself; it had come to life. That moment made me realize that that idea and that product would have a lot of potential for the future.

Speaking of the future, what’s the story behind your new silent pneumatic wheel?

I had the chance to learn about a patent trying to come to life but without a space. I decided to believe in this idea. I liked the idea of having a technological evolution as well as an aesthetic and philosophical one; it gave me a sense of completeness about what I was doing, even on a practical level. We decided to take this idea, to continue to develop it, to bring it to industrialization and commercialization. The idea was to create a tire with a natural inner tube, which allows cushioning and creates softness. This comes from the choice of materials and the roundness of the design that creates a pleasant, I would say, extremely Italian effect.

Lunar was launched during the Venice Architecture Biennale with a striking installation of Parasite 2.0 and a limited edition of Crash Baggage in a new space-like gradient. What are these choices derived from?

Lunar is a “Made in Italy” project and is developed in the Veneto region. We are also based in Veneto and decided to launch it in Venice because what city can represent this more than Venice?

Lunar wheels also have aesthetic value. We worked hard to give them an aesthetic consistent with Italian design. The balance between design and technical function allowed us to achieve the first goal, although the project is still in the development and industrialization phase. We decided to come out with only one size (the carry-on size) and are working on the other sizes. I don’t know if it will be the innovation that will turn all the wheels of all the suitcases in the world upside down, but I am convinced that it can find its place.

Lunar may have many other applications besides luggage because there are so many things in the world that travel on small wheels. Have you started experimenting with different applications yet?

There have been some exciting discussions, from hospital beds and walkers to electric scooters in cities, and also strollers. Even if the wheel gets punctured, it keeps its structure, cushioning, and it keeps doing its job. It keeps going. This is a quality of its own. Also, it does not damage the floors indoors or in public places.

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Interview: Italian Fashion Designer Jezabelle Cormio

The emerging talent speaks about alternative style, gender roles and what it means to make truthful design

Paolo Ferrarini

1 December 2023

For decades, novelties in Italian fashion were rare when it came to new brands and designers. This has changed rapidly in recent years, as evidenced by the increasingly frequent international awards attributed to the new generation of Italian designers. Among these, Cormio is undoubtedly one of the most exciting.

Jezabelle Cormio, a designer of Italian American origin based in Milan, founded the brand after studying at the prestigious Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, under famed director Walter Van Beirendonck. Her brand was immediately characterized by an eccentric aesthetic vision, defiant of traditional gender roles, that embraced kitsch.

Recently, Cormio was one of the participants in Forces of Fashion, an international event curated by Vogue in Rome. There, we met her to discuss fashion, family, tailoring and what it means to be a designer today in Italy.

Let’s start with your fashion education. You choose Antwerp, where creativity is seen as more important than industry.

In Antwerp, fashion design culture is based on personal DNA. The stakes are high—to find out who you are and then build this little brand based on yourself through the years. Students are not asked to think about the commercial side or propose things that they would see, let’s say, in a Versace show. No one’s asking anybody to think, “What would I do if I worked at Dolce & Gabbana?” No one cares. 

How were you able to combine this northern European drive toward self-expression with a more commercially oriented Italian side?

One thing is, I don’t really see my work as very Italian. I think many people are surprised sometimes when they find out I’m Italian. I’m not trying to look Italian, but I am also Italian; I can’t choose. One thing that I find really fun is to think about Italy from outside and inside at the same time. Because I’m half American and half Italian, I always enjoy critical thinking by looking at the other country from the outside. 

Your sources of inspiration—like Tyrol or soccer—are unusual for the fashion world. What makes those references interesting to you? Is it a way to distance yourself from tradition?

When I went to South Tyrol for the first time, I was in my mid-twenties. All the souvenir stores were filled with stuff I’ve seen my whole life, everywhere. I’ve seen traditional stuffed hearts in Puglia, pot holders in my aunt’s kitchen, Roman guys with Austrian coats, rich people’s weddings in Switzerland or Austria.

I think the Tyrolean aesthetic is appropriated by the Italian upper class to distance themselves from the Italian vulgar aesthetic that we can’t get rid of. There are codes; it’s pure, it’s clean. Also, the food, the water and the air are supposedly clean and pure there. And then, on the other hand, I also see that Germanic side that is very funny, like sausage, beer and sex jokes.

Is there anything from classic tailoring that influences your work?

I have a love-hate relationship with tailoring. Sometimes, it’s a cage; sometimes, elegance is a cage. It’s a little bit of an alibi for not having something else to say. I really like jerseys and denim now. And graphics and embroidery. I’m not saying that one day I won’t get a lot of satisfaction from tailoring, but there’s something so immediate, youthful and communicative about these other things.

The first time we saw something from Cormio, we fell in love with your embroidery. It recalled some very intimate memories from youth. I’m sure that many others recognize something personal in your products. Do you think about that when you design?

I used to think about it a lot in the beginning, and then it started rolling freely. When I was a small child, my great-grandmother was the only person in the family tree who could make anything. She would knit us sweaters and they were my favorites. Sometimes, they had these fibers that we wouldn’t see in Italy because it was from my American great-grandmother. They had magical powers to me like you can’t lose it, it can’t break.

When I started making clothes a few years ago, I couldn’t imagine somebody taking something I made and throwing it away. So, I try as much as possible to create a bond between the person and the clothing. If it has an emotional response or this tactile aspect of embroidery, if you can tangibly understand it’s been handmade, I think people develop a stronger relationship. They don’t just look at it as something that was supposed to fix some bad mood two weeks ago.

We know you have a passion for eBay, Etsy, Vinted and others.

Yeah, it’s my part-time job to find useless things!

Tell us more about that. 

It goes in phases because I need a lot of time. My latest obsession is subito.it because I find all the best things in the world. I love to scroll until I’m completely nauseous and my finger hurts. And then I find something, and I could drive to Naples to get it. I don’t care. I just moved into a new house. I went to Modena, put a wardrobe for my daughter on top of the car, and drove back home in the rain.

On eBay, I buy a lot of stuff. The good thing about eBay is that the platform has never really gotten up to date. It’s so uncomfortable to use that lazy people don’t use it. Stuff stays on eBay for longer. Whereas Vinted is so immediate that people are just constantly buying. And the shipping is pretty cheap. People buy really fast on Vinted, but eBay has remained the Amazon forest of online platforms.

In a recent interview, you said that in your vision for menswear, you wish that boyfriends could steal objects from their girlfriends.

That would be fun. It’s not gender neutral; it’s dress up. This is how I feel comfortable. It’s not if you’re a girl you wear a skirt, if you’re a boy you wear pants. It’s more like [finding] the safest area, and you can have fun outside it. There is a real fascination with stealing stuff from your boyfriend’s wardrobe or a woman appropriating a man’s wardrobe. But men don’t do it because they feel emasculated.

I noticed that in your photo shoots, there are a lot of women of all ages and many children, too. Why is this?

It has to do with the fact that I have a child. It was tough to reconcile having a family and not resigning from trying to feel young, dynamic, in touch with the world, and cool in a way.

But when I had the child, I didn’t have any references. I didn’t know anybody with kids; none of my friends had kids. I realized there was so much prejudice from my circle of people, the creative class or the new generation. People are very afraid of giving up everything that they have conquered to become bourgeois, bland parents. I found it very hard to reconcile those two things because I felt like I was being asked to abandon everything I was before and just hear, “Be on time at the kindergarten! Bring the fucking diapers! We don’t care that you have a company to run, fit in with the other moms!”

I thought there had to be more imagery about being young and having a child. I’m not even that young. I had a child at 30; nowadays, I’m considered a very young mother. I also thought one thing that was expected of me was to abandon all forms of sensuality or personal sexual identity.

You are part of the new generation of Italian designers selected by Vogue for Fashion Panorama and now the Roman edition of Forces of Fashion. You all have your brands and are not creative directors in big companies. You all know each other, and some of you are close friends. Do you see yourselves as a group?

We know each other, and we are close. We get together when we have to discuss industry dynamics because we all get the same treatment, in a way. From a sociological point of view, we have our own brand because we don’t fit in with the other brands. And the other brands are so big that they take up all the space. I’m sure we were all lucky for some reason.

I’ve had this brand for four years, but I can say I’ve had it for 10 years in different forms. I started producing things under my name when I was still in university because of some lucky opportunity with Opening Ceremony. Then, I didn’t know how to push it forward for a while because I didn’t know anything: I didn’t know about showrooms or investors; it just looked very slow from the outside. 

We also live in a society that hates young people right now. The fact that you might want to go and do something on your own seems like a survival tactic in a way.

Will you be able to change aesthetics? We ask that because the things you and your colleagues make are sometimes tricky to understand and they’re not highly commercial. It is brave.

Or naive. Could we change the aesthetics? Yes. The question is how fast and how much, what does it take. When I see the big maisons, some look identical for years. There’s nothing new, and it’s also not very specific to our time. And then there is also the fact that very big brands make everything that is trending right now. They don’t pick sides. They don’t just say, “We won’t do the baseball hat.” No, everybody does the baseball hat. It’s so smooth, but it’s also a little bit bland.

I think the opposite of that is probably a brand that doesn’t do everything and does a very specific, truthful design. On a tactile level, it feels a bit different because something that is not mass-produced has a taste; it really has a feeling.

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Inside Geneva, Switzerland’s CERN Science Gateway

The new center for scientific education and outreach opens to the public in a brand new building by Renzo Piano

Paolo Ferrarini

8 November 2023

When Fabiola Gianotti, the Director-General of CERN in Geneva, saw acclaimed architect Renzo Piano‘s vision for the Science Gateway back in 2018, she knew that it must come life—and be funded only by donations. As of October 2023, the scientific center is now open to the public and it has become a place dedicated to scientific education, where anyone can discover the secrets of the cosmos, free of charge. Thanks to this enthralling new destination, around 500,000 visitors per year will have the chance to visit CERN—far more than the current 150,000.

During the inauguration event, Gianotti stressed how complex it was to give shape to this vision, which would have been impossible without a collective effort. “The realization of such an ambitious project in such a short time demonstrates CERN’s excellence in many and varied fields, the competence of our teams and their ability to work together effectively, whether it is building a new accelerator or developing a new technology or carrying out an education project for the general public,” she said.

The majestic project includes a total surface area of 8,000 square meters, including 1,400 dedicated to exhibitions and 260 for labs. The architecture is the work of Renzo Piano Building Workshop, and is inspired by CERN laboratories and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world. The building also serves as a bridge connecting two areas of CERN once separated—and it develops six meters above the road floor. Seen from above, the center looks like an orbiting space station, but at the same time it reminds us of the LHC tunnels, which stretch for 27 kilometers at a depth of 100 meters. Approximately 4000 square meters of solar panels power this building and other areas of CERN. And the complex is surrounded by a forest of 400 trees and 13,000 shrubs, destined to grow and increase over the years. Additionally, the entire construction process had a net-zero carbon footprint.

During the opening ceremony, Piano was particularly emotional. “I love making places for people,” he said. “But this place is more than a place for people. It’s a place where you get closer to the beauty of science, the profound, deep beauty of science. The beauty of exploring and discovering. And also you get closer to the mystery of the infinitely small and the infinitely large. From this point of observation, you understand that planet Earth is really a small spaceship on which we are all embarked.”

CERN has always been a location for research, harmony and peace. People from 110 nations work there, and many of them will take turns guiding visitors. In fact, all the guides are part of the CERN community, so as to ensure direct contact with the real research activities that are held in Geneva.

In addition to courses, classes and conferences, the center will welcome visitors into three pavilions dedicated to the history of science, plus a fourth focused on art installations related to science. The first space, “Discover CERN,” tells the story of the original center born in 1954. Through objects, experiments, interactive installations and virtual reality, its exhibition illustrates the fundamental experiments related to particle acceleration. With the “Quantum World” exhibition, quantum physics becomes a game. Challenges, board games and walkthroughs allow visitors to understand the fundamental laws of elementary particles and to touch what is usually invisible.

The Our Universe pavilion is dedicated to the “Back to the Big Bang” exhibition, funded entirely by the Carla Fendi Foundation, which invited us to Geneva and allowed us to preview these spaces. Here, we journeyed 13.8 billion years back in time, learning of sophisticated machinery, tales of pioneering scientists and more. Altogether, anyone who loves science will find something to connect with, while those who are interested in discovering more about CERN will find the Science Gateway to be the ideal place to start.

All information, news and updates for the Science Gateway can be found online.

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Inside the ITS Arcademy, Museum of Art in Fashion

In Trieste, Italy, a new space highlights creativity through exhibitions, archives and education

Paolo Ferrarini

25 October 2023

The ITS Contest represents one of the most important awards for emerging fashion worldwide. Among the acclaimed alumni are Demna Gvasalia (known colloquially as Demna, the founder of Vetements and creative director of Balenciaga), Matthieu Blazy (creative director of Bottega Veneta), Richard Quinn and dozens of professionals defining contemporary fashion. The competition originated from and still resides in Trieste, a port city in northeastern Italy, away from the better known centers of international fashion. Less than one year ago, ITS Arcademy, Museum of Art in Fashion opened its doors, a place that shares the story of the award and contributes to its future as well.

Barbara Franchin founded ITS and managed to put the ITS  Contest on the calendars of the most important fashion houses, who now rely on her talent scouting when they’re looking for their next visionary hire. Since 2002, Franchin and her staff have preserved and catalogued every single portfolio they’ve received, as well as the clothes and accessories made by each applicant. The result is an astonishing archive of 14,758 fashion portfolios (the largest on the planet), 1,089 dresses, 163 accessories, 118 jewelry pieces and more than 700 photographic projects. For years, the archive has been closed to the public, but this changed with the opening of the museum.

The exhibition area begins with a highly emotional video inspired by the manifesto, followed by a short journey through the history of the contest. Then, visitors enter the impressive portfolio archive. Some portfolios are on display, others are reproduced digitally and can be browsed on a large interactive book. The exploration continues into the debut installation, The First Exhibition. 20 years of contemporary fashion evolution, a straightforward exploration of fashion expressed through roughly 100 dresses, accompanied by a beautiful catalogue and curated by Olivier Saillard. It is here that we met with Franchin to learn more.

First of all, why the name arcademy? What does this neologism mean?

It’s an ambitious name, a name that contains three different meanings. Let’s start with this “R” that looks like a typo, but instead is a reference to the word ark. We felt like an ark. We are, around the world, collecting species and saving them. Our claim, our manifesto is simply to save creativity.

Secondly, [it is an] archive, because we are born from the contest and instead of throwing things away we held onto everything. Everything finds a home in 1,400 square meters, a space for everyone to discover their own creativity through the creativity of others. 

The third concept is academy [because] we have an educational part. We do this through our archive, through the emotions and projects of 14,000 people. This education gives us immense satisfaction. Seeing the reactions when you inspire someone, when you give them an opportunity, makes us speechless. If people can still think, create, have their own thoughts, then we have hope.

This is not simply a museum, but a living place. What purpose does it serve?

The idea is constantly evolving. We don’t have a fixed idea and we don’t want to have one. We wouldn’t crystallize it into a museum. We decided not to plan longer into the future than three years because we don’t know what’s going to happen—what the world will be like in three years. We want to be ready to change quickly.

What might the next exhibition be?

It is clear that the ITS archive is at the base. We have more than a thousand pieces in the archive that can dialogue with themselves or with visitors. The breadth of the dialogue on display will change from time to time. How will it evolve? Maybe in four years there will not even be one piece of the archive on display, maybe only one project, a thought or a sentence.

Taking what you know from ITS, what is your vision of the future of fashion?

Definitely sustainability and the smaller is better concept show you that most likely fashion will be more personal. It will be more of a one-to-one fashion. Young people tend to use the bare minimum, to make to order, to cut only the materials they need, to recycle, to recover. This is definitely a part that already exists but it will grow more and more.

As far as artificial intelligence is concerned, we saw the first signs of it six, seven years ago. We are very interested. We are waiting to see if the designers will use it or will be used by it. I definitely appreciate it when it is used as a tool that increases your creative ability, rather than replacing you.

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Understanding Nature Through Design at the Lake Como Design Festival

The fifth edition of this Italian festival explores nature, inspired by a two-thousand-year-old book

Paolo Ferrarini

19 September 2023

One of Europe’s most exciting design events, the Lake Como Design Festival (running now through 24 September) has returned for an illuminating fifth edition. This year it coincides with celebrations honoring Pliny the Elder, the great philosopher born in Como exactly two thousand years ago. Pliny authored the majestic work Naturalis Historia and, for this reason, he is considered the inventor of the encyclopedia and the first naturalist. The festival’s creative director, Lorenzo Butti, extrapolated from this coincidence and chose nature as the event’s key theme—but from a conceptual point of view, rather than an ecological or ideological one. “The Naturalis Historia teaches us to observe nature. It reveals it to us. To observe the world is to look at the stories outside our window,” Butti says. Taking this into consideration, he adds that sustainability is an inevitable point of discussion for the festival but he wanted to hone in on “ecology as a reflection of design.”

After visiting the festival around the lakeside city, we’ve selected the following five events as highlights.

The Other Animals

The title for The Other Animals comes from a phrase by Pliny that concludes the volume of the Naturalis Historia that is dedicated to human beings: “Now I will go on to talk about the other animals.” For the exhibit, at the central Piazza del Duomo, the curators selected designer items, works of art, prints and handicrafts from different eras. Everything is arranged on three tables according to three categories—air, earth and water—and where the animals live. Among the artists on display are René Burri, Andrea Branzi, Enzo Cucchi, Mario De Biasi, Michele De Lucchi, Aldo Londi, Formafantasma, Enzo Mari, Steve McCurry, Ico Parisi, Martin Parr, Ettore Sottsass and fashion designer Thom Browne.

In describing the exhibition, the curator and president of the Accademia Pliniana, Massimiliano Mondelli, explains, “This exhibition has various levels of interpretation. One is playful—it’s a simple and fun way to approach the exhibition’s themes of nature and design. Second, you can read into it with much more depth, interpreting every passage. You too will come out with an irrepressible desire to read the Naturalis Historia.”

Between Art and Nature

Carla Sozzani began her career as a journalist and editor of fashion magazines. Subsequently, she founded 10 Corso Como, as well as a publishing house, and the Carla Sozzani Gallery (an international reference point for photography). The essence of her work lies in a personal collection that counts thousands of images by famous, emerging and forgotten photographers. For the festival, Sozzani exhibits a selection of nature-related works entitled Between Art and Nature. Photographs from the Collection of Carla Sozzani in the magnificent Ex Convento Orsoline San Carlo.

“This is a very personal collection,” curator Maddalena Scarzella tells us, “because it was not collected according to a typology or a chronology, but almost by instinct and experience.” Within there are 78 images by 21 photographers on display. These photos range from botanical documentation by Karl Blossfeldt and Edward Sheriff Curtis to the visions of Francesca Woodman and Max Vadukul, concluding with the colorful fantasies of David LaChapelle.

Contemporary Design Selection

For Villa Salazar (built in the 1700s, and now open to the public for the first time), curator Giovanna Massoni went in search of designers experimenting with ideas and materiality. She grouped them into the exhibition Contemporary Design Selection. Within, the ceramics of Alice Reina, Arianna de Luca and Edgar Orlaineta surprise with color and material that looks like paper. The “Giraffa Alta” lamp by Jonathan Bocca – J.o.b Studio occupies an entire room, as does the “Eruption” lamp by Francesco Maria Messina, inspired by Mount Vesuvius’ eruption in 79CE and made of cement, resins, metal and mineral stone. Pieces by ccontinua+mamt, a ceramist and a tattoo artist who decorate vases with organic shapes as if they were leather, and Coco Brun, who switches seamlessly from metal to salts that grow naturally above the vessels, also impress. The works on display here can also be purchased via auction on Catawiki.

Back to Nature

For the first time in the history of the Lake Como Design Festival, design installations are taking place at Villa Olmo, one of the city’s architectural symbols. As part of Back to Nature. Explorations of nature through the lens of design and art, we encountered “The Second Song: Falling to Earth,” a site-specific installation by Kris Ruhs that’s a waterfall of 30,000 handmade flowers. In the majestic surroundings of the villa, original drawings from Ken Scott‘s archive, rarely seen in public, are displayed. Further, the Brazilian company ETEL presents reissues of objects by Oscar Niemeyer. Galleria Rossana Orlandi is also stationed here, with a bed/sculpture by Draga & Aurel with Giuliano dell’Uva.

Off 2023

In addition to the institutional exhibitions, Como is currently alive with independent artistic initiatives. Among them, we were struck by De Curiositas at Galleria Ramo, where Benedetta De Rosa selected designers capable of crafting rather unusual pieces. This is the case with Fòlia, a small collection of objects designed by Naessi. Starting with panels drawn from the scraps of the rice industry, subsequently coated with briar, the Roman duo conceived of a curvaceous console and two tables. Elswhere, at WIP Studio, the photo exhibit Corrispondenze presents Mattia Vacca‘s powerful “A Winter’s Tale.” Across 10 years, Vacca documented the carnival of Schignano, near Como, a unique event that reenacts stories of migration.

Read Style

Pippa Small’s Ethical Jewelry Brand

The British anthropologist and entrepreneur tells us how she created a bridge between local communities and international markets

Paolo Ferrarini

22 August 2023

The world of jewelry is as fascinating as it is controversial. Although many people own and wear jewelry pieces, there are often ethical concerns associated with exploitation, colonization, pollution and depletion of resources. Pippa Small has found an alternate way to make—and make sense of—jewelry, something she’s loved since she was little. A trained anthropologist, Small worked for human rights campaigns. During research trips, she came into contact with many artisans around the world. Small was able to create jobs that employed these artisans and develop a sustainable jewelry business in the process.

“I’m coming to design from human rights,” she tells us. “In the process of working with communities, particularly in Southeast Asia, I constantly came across people who would say, ‘will you take these baskets or beads or bracelets and sell them for us?’ I’d always be trundling back to London with these things that I would try to sell, but not very successfully.”

To Small, an idea grew from the challenge. “At a certain point, I thought of becoming a [sort of] bridge. The materials and the talent are there, and the need and the market are here. This little area between these two worlds really needed someone to be alongside. So I started doing that 25 years ago, and the first project I did was with the Bushmen in Botswana, and South Africa.”

From the very beginning, her approach was deeply rooted in her anthropological background. “I carried on being someone who could sit alongside artisans and get a sense and an understanding of their life, of their experience, of their challenges, of the community’s political history. [I started] doing a lot of research around the material culture and how it fits in as an identifier, then working with them to keep their voice but translating it so that it could become something in London, Paris, New York, Tokyo.”

For Small, jewelry is more than a beautiful object; it has a story. “Jewelry has always had financial value but emotional importance as well,” she says. “It becomes something we’re very attached to. We wear it close to us. It’s quite a universal thing. It’s very challenging to be able to give voice and give respect to the artisan in a way that’s compact, quick and biteable.”

To channel this, Small began to make films and share insightful stories on the Pippa Small Jewelry website. “I think film is one way that is really wonderful because you get a sense of sound as well,” she explains. “You hear the language; you hear the voice. I remember particularly when I first started working with the Bushmen in Botswana. They have a click language, and it felt as important to hear that, to see the landscape, the hands, the faces to understand.” 

The process by which she discovers different local cultures is fascinating. “There are some places that I chose to go to, like in Panama. The Guna People [have] a very strong sense of identity and have been very much in control of their destinies for a long time, [with] a lot of self-determination that other groups haven’t,” she says. “I went to Guna Yala and met with some artisans and saw that gold was a massive part of their heritage, tradition and sense of identity for hundreds of years.” 

“Equally, the Mapuche in Chile are the same; their jewelry is, again, such a symbol of resistance and continues to be,” she continues. “If you go to some protest in Santiago, the Mapuche will come out wearing silver jewelry because that’s very much a political statement. And I was interested in that. So in those cases, I was working directly with communities, and I was fascinated that in both cultures, the jewelry was a sign of their identity as opposed to the colonial experience.” 

Small has worked a lot with Turquoise Mountain, an arts charity started by King Charles III that looks at traditional architecture restoration and craft. Recently, she’s also “been working in Colombia, which was very much me looking for alternative sourcing for gold through different mining organizations. So it depends from place to place, different motivations, different relationships of how we found each other.”

Small has seen substantial change while convening with various cultures, including mindset, particularly in Afghanistan. “As a young person there, you would learn from your master to copy and copy their work as exactly as you could,” she says. “That would be a sign of respect for your teacher, and it would be a sign of your ability as well. There wasn’t this western individualist notion that you would create something that was yours, your innovation, your design. It was very much a collective movement. Of course, things changed and developed in Afghanistan, but it is not a traditional concept to come up with something.”

She’s also witnessed attitudes toward work change quite radically. “When I started working in Asia particularly, the idea of making things—whether it was building roads or making jewelry—was all about using your hands, and that was considered a lowly, dirty thing,” she says. “Even if it was working with gold, it didn’t matter, at the end of the day, you were in a workshop making things, and there was mess and noise, and it just wasn’t considered the very high-status thing to do. People I worked with used to say, ‘I don’t want my children to do this; I want them to work in an office and have cleanliness around them.’ Now I see that their children are working for them because it’s risen in stature, they’re respected. It’s become an industry. Now, in most places I work, people have their pride. They would have been laborers, basically, as opposed to artisans. This shift in title [brings] increased pay and increased respect.”

Sustainability is a crucial consideration for Small, who admits the biggest hindrance. “The word sustainable is really problematic for jewelry,” she admits, “because sustainable by definition means it can go on. And jewelry is made of finite materials. There’s only so much gold, so many gems. When they’re all gone, they will all be gone; they won’t regrow. They’re not going to harvest and plant again. This is not, unfortunately, a word for jewelry. It’s not compatible.”

“However, I do use the word sustainable—perhaps a little oddly—for jobs,” she continues. “For example, in Afghanistan, in 15 years, young men who started in the workshop are now fathers and have children. It means that they’ve kept a job, and jobs are increasingly so crucial. The only way I would ever use the word sustainable is regarding jobs because that’s something that is really, really important in so many parts of the world. A safe job that allows you to be creative and express yourself, work in a team and work from your culture and heritage.”

Design, business acumen, human rights considerations, history and anthropology are all present equally in Small’s work. “I’d say I’m just like an incredibly curious person who’s got an endless fascination with people and places,” she says. “Entrepreneur is such a funny word. Is it a negative word or a positive word? I suppose it [means] looking for opportunities and finding ways to make things happen. So maybe that’s a bit of it. I find ways to make things happen.”

Pippa Small’s pieces are sold online and at her London and Los Angeles flagship stores.

Read Travel

60 Years of Cala di Volpe

Assouline’s new book celebrates the development and continued popularity of this iconic property

Paolo Ferrarini

10 August 2023

Sardinia’s northern Costa Smeralda resonates as one of the best-known places in the world for travelers seeking luxury amidst incredible natural surroundings. Celebrating its 60th anniversary, Hotel Cala di Volpe embodies this celebrated and unique destination. Despite its age, it’s among the most beloved hotels in the world, in large part due to a beautifully balanced experience of nature and architecture. Its anniversary is being celebrated in part with a book published by Assouline and the completion of a multi-year restyling by the famed studio Moinard Bétaille.

Cala di Volpe was a centerpiece of Costa Smeralda’s transition into a tourism and real estate destination, created in 1962 by Prince Karim Aga Khan IV and his Sardinian partners, now managed by Smeralda Holding. Until then, it was a wild and uninhabited territory where nature took precedence, and since then the human impact has been limited, allowing visitors to experience the sea and the land in a unique way.

The hotel’s design was entrusted to Jacques Couelle, a visionary French architect whose work fuses architecture and sculpture. It is said that upon his arrival to the undeveloped location he laid on the ground to feel the shape of the land with his own body. In its 176 pages and 150 images, the Assouline book captures the birth and decades of evolution of this destination, from the first building to its new renovation. Presenting the volume in Porto Cervo, author Nicky Swallow underlined the development of a project that became a community: “I do not think there is, in Europe, a tourist area so connected with the nature in which it is immersed: 96% of the areas of the consortium are still green. This has allowed it to host sophisticated but relaxed tourism, and this philosophy endures over the decades.”

These choices create a singular relationship between place and people. “It’s like entering another world. And then we must emphasize the relationship created between customers and staff: on both sides, we know that there is such an affection for the place and the atmosphere that the bonds last for many years and become a friendship.

Cala di Volpe has over 60% repeat guests: when they arrive, they are greeted with kisses and hugs, and when they leave, the tears run. They may have discovered Cala di Volpe for their honeymoon many years ago and then returned with their children, who remain hotel customers and feel at home. Some customers leave personal items in custody and find them the following summer. It is the concept of the ‘Cala di Volpe family.'”

At “the Cala,” the name by which loyal visitors refer to it‚ such a delicate balance is preserved with extreme care, and any transformation, however small, can create an imbalance. Architects Bruno Moinard and Claire Bétaille were well aware of this how when they started the restyling work in 2018.

“We immediately had a thought when we got there,” declares Bétaille. “It’s a bit like Tancredi said in The Leopard: ‘If we want everything to stay as it is, everything has to change.’ And that was our refrain with the whole team here because the guests love this place, which we had to respect but surpass.” Their intervention was delicate and respectful of the past. The curved and sculptural lines of the walls have been preserved, in some cases accentuated. Plasters that blend with locally sourced tree branches are still in place, as are stained glass windows made of uneven glass fragments. Similarly, the general sense of spontaneity of the forms was maintained, which were often shaped by the hands of Jacques Couelle themselves as images in the book demonstrate.

Bruno Moinard underlines this idea in his own words. “We arrived at this project in a very humble way. We threw ourselves into the creation of Couelle with full arms,” he says. “We looked for all the imperfections, all the branches, all the pieces of wood, all the imperfect coatings, all the interceptive things that are due to man’s hand and the time that passes. And we retranslated all this. This project is like a theater scene that was not illuminated, awakened, and bright. And deep down, we worked mainly on highlighting this place.”

Nevertheless, some elements needed to be changed. “We prolonged the gentleness,” he says. “The gentleness of the building existed. But we were well aware, and we all knew that when we entered the rooms, we were in front of furniture, things from the 1960s that had a certain stiffness and did not have the tactile or ergonomic side we love today.”

The relationship between the views and the interiors in Cala di Volpe is significant. For this reason, the architects have chosen to emphasize the continuous passage between the sea’s blue hue and the rooms’ pale colors, between communal areas and private places, all thanks to the dimension of fluidity. “We understand that there’s a coherence between the outside and the inside,” he says. “That’s why we slide along walls; we slide into a bathroom, a passage, in those typical corridors that look like burrows. [We did that with] carpets laid as if put by chance, but with a lot of calculated imperfection to keep our project fresh.”

As directed by Smeralda Holding, this restyling had to guarantee a future that will be in step with the changing times for decades to come, keeping the sense of luxury intact. And nature was vital, says Claire Bétaille, “When we look at Cala di Volpe, we immediately understand the power of nature, a potent nature that inspires architectural and artistic creation. These two things suddenly find themselves in symbiosis and the form of refinement and intense luxury. And finally, we say to ourselves that there is no more current subject than this power of nature that offers an experience at this level of refinement on a territory. All this for us today is highly contemporary.”

The book Cala di Volpe is on sale at the Costa Smeralda boutique at the waterfront of Porto Cervo, at Assouline stores and retailers and on the Assouline website for $110.

Read Tech

Levante’s Origami-Style Solar Panels

Already funded on Kickstarter, this new power source is born from the passion of two lovers of outdoor life

Paolo Ferrarini

6 July 2023

Living life on the road (or at sea) is a choice embraced by many people worldwide. Although such a lifestyle provides freedom and the opportunity for adventure, it can require problem solving—including, for instance, how to maintain a power supply. In 2021, Sara Plaga and Kim-Joar Myklebus both quit their corporate jobs and began to live between a boat and an RV, along with Aurora, their newborn daughter. They quickly discovered that the preexisting solar panels on the market were unsuitable for their needs—so together they created Levante, the first modular origami-style solar panel.

We connected with Plaga and Myklebus via Zoom to learn their story and to dive deeper into the already fully funded Kickstarter campaign, which they launched in June, to bring Levante’s solar panels to life.

“We are on a sailboat along the Spanish coast,” Plaga begins. “We’re taking the boat to Sardinia while coordinating the Kickstarter campaign. We always do such things and find ourselves in these high-adrenaline situations.”

Plaga, who studied Business Management at Bocconi University in Milan, worked in marketing at ZEISS for several years. Myklebus, who was born in Sweden and studied design and engineering at Politecnico in Milan, worked for Dallara in Formula 1 and Formula 3. Their passion for the outdoors and travel took them to the road two years ago. As Plaga recounts, “we decided to do this because we believed in it. We also wanted to put all of our passion into being freer, following our dreams and working from where we wanted. This was the primary goal.”

“We are passionate about RVs and sailing, and in our travels, we often felt the need to have electricity and be unplugged from the grid. Obviously, in settings with little space, like the RV and boat, having so much photovoltaic power [or PV] is always a problem, mainly because of the limited space. We had already installed a PV system on the RV and the boat but noticed several limitations,” Plaga continues.

“PV is a fantastic technology,” Myklebus explains, “but it is not designed for a mobile context. Also, it is a fixed installation, so you have to have one PV panel for the boat and one for the RV, which is bulky and heavy. We saw that folding solar panels are already being used in the aerospace industry, but of course, those are for use in zero gravity and they have very high budgets. We got inspired, we believed in it and we took off.” Their resulting product is a 100% made-in-Italy solar panel that is modular and foldable according to a patented “origami-style structure” that allows it to be reduced in size up to 8 times. When opened, it becomes a rigid item that produces up to 500 watts of energy, the highest on the market for a foldable panel.

“On the market today, there are fixed panels that are more rigid,” Myklebus points out, “or portable panels, but they don’t offer such high power. What we do is produce those two products in one. Ours is a rigid structure—you can even step on it—but it is designed to be moved. You can install it for a whole season on the boat, then take it off and put it under the deck, or take it to an RV and install it on the roof. If the RV doesn’t stay in the sun because you want to be in the shade, thanks to a wire, you can move the panel into sunlight and support it with a special pedestal.”

Plaga and Myklebus tell us that they hope Levante will become “the GoPro of solar panels” thanks to its suite of custom accessories. In fact, micro-inverters, hooks and pedestals are provided, with purchase, to adapt the panels to all kinds of outdoor situations. Remarkably, Plaga and Myklebus were inspired by the modularity of LEGO, and as such the panels can easily be expanded by adding more modules or simply modified using a set differently.

The spirit behind Levante is also environmental, says Plaga: “I can buy one panel if that’s what I need, but I can add more later. You can attach hinges similar to marine hinges, so they are sturdy. I can start with a 300-watt module, then in the future buy more modules and go up to 500 watts or even 700 watts or 1 kilowatt.”

Other companies were involved in the development process, as much for technical advancement as for field testing. Myklebus explains, “The initial idea came from us, and we patented it. But we realized early on that you can’t do it all by yourself, so we partnered with an engineering company in Turin called MAN Evotech to optimize the design at the industrial level and bring the idea to be able to be produced more effectively.”

“Another important aspect at the R&D level,” says Plaga, “is the collaboration with Sailing Uma, a YouTube channel with over 400,000 subscribers. They have been living on a sailboat for 10 years and have a lot of experience in outdoor life. They use a 36-foot electric sailboat and, from the start, they came on board to help us develop every prototype we do, which they also test for us.”

Plaga and Myklebus will travel by boat and RV between the US and Europe in the coming months to show Levante directly to outdoor enthusiasts. The Kickstarter campaign started on 16 June and will run until mid-July. Success was immediate, and they reached the target funding total within an hour. To learn more, visit the official website or the dedicated Kickstarter page.

Images courtesy of Evergreen Design Studio, property of Levante SRL