It's coming, it's coming, it's coming!
From June 7 to June 12, Milan Design Week begins. This is the 'Olympic Games' of the global furniture industry, bringing together the world's top design ideas and top design achievements.
There is no doubt that you can see beauty at Milan Design Week.
But at the same time, perhaps you'd like to join us in looking at the changes and novelties in design.
Hermes, IKEA, Porsche, do something special
HERMÈS will not be absent from Milan Design Week.
Every year Hermès presents the brand's latest home collection during Milan Design Week, last year they focused more on going back to their roots - all the products on display entice you to touch and experience it, revealing at once the evocative power that comes from raw and natural materials, such as paper microfiber seats, white cashmere felt mixed with gold thread, tables carved from stone.
▲ 2021 Hermes for you to touch
But this year, Hermes used a new material.
For the first time, textiles are the central theme of the home collection. For this year's designs, Hermès paid extra attention to lightweight cashmere, and Gianpaolo Pagni, the designer who created the Hippomobiles pattern, used cashmere to create a bedspread that highlights patchwork and quilting techniques, balancing the vibrancy and durability of the textile through this most delicate of natural fibers.
Certainly not cheap. But I can at least tell from this sheet that cashmere weaves with expensive materials after Hermes are probably only going to become more available.
▲ Cashmere Weaving by Hermes
Porsche's immersive sculpture "Art of Dreams" is a combination of flowers and technical products.
An immersive art installation by floral artist Ruby Barber of Mary Lennox Studios, the installation will be paired with a dozen drones to realize the artist's vision of allowing renderings and animations from the virtual realm to be transmitted to reality.
▲ Flowers with Drones
On-site visitors will also be able to explore the interaction between nature and technology through fantastic installations and experience a surreal visionary presentation.
As for why Porsche would make such an installation, Ruby's answer would know the art of language.
We often see photography of old sports cars with a bouquet of flowers on top, and the instinctive combination of the two creates something visually stimulating. Flowers and cars are also an extravagantly beautiful 'language', and the coexistence between the organic and the man-made, the natural and the artificial, is an inspiring and interesting aesthetic pairing.
▲ Drones and flowers
If Hermes shows a specific product and Porsche is an artistic installation, then Prada is a "seminar" called Prada Frames, and the whole level is raised with a "swish".
The beat workers are crying when they hear about it, listening to the boss meetings at work and the artist meetings during design week.
▲ Prada calls you to a meeting
But that's the most special part of Prada, this workshop has speakers who, in addition to artists in the fields of design, architecture and curation, are also anthropologists and activists whose sharing and results go beyond product design, that is, to make you go further to understand the complex relationship between design and the natural environment.
Formafantasma has been researching the role that forest ecosystems can play in design, and their collaboration with Prada at Design Week aims to build a new platform that doesn't criticize the ecology of product manufacturing, but rather works to develop a new design culture. Prada's head honcho also stated.
Dialogue has always been central to the world of Prada research, so the Prada Framework and Formafantasma are a very natural step in that direction.
▲ Workshop Live Installation
Luxury goods meet to make cashmere home products, only LOEWE is still 'unforgettable'. The brand makes raincoats, hats and baskets from straw, reeds, wild roses and other natural fibers.
But what is most impressive is the sophisticated skill they show in the weaving of their bags, a series of bags that have both a sculptural impact and equally spirited tassels on them.
▲ LOEWE's Woven Bag
The presence of these brands at Milan Design Week is more about being pioneering and comprehensive - after all, everyone knows that brands are never best known for their furniture. But not for Ikea, which sells furniture and is coming to Milan as if it were 'going home' and creating a six-day 'IKEA Festival' in Milan.
In the IKEA Festival you can see the project H22 in Helsingborg, Sweden, which aims to build sustainable cities of the future. The exhibition, named after the 'moment', will show how different people relate to the houses they live in.
▲ Part of the IKEA Festival
The whole IKEA Festival experience is like shopping at IKEA, or the Experience Plus version. Because there is a cinema, food stalls, a variety of round shops, a performance area dedicated to musicians and speakers, and a flash mob area that is different every day, so you get a new feeling every day.
One of them will be a young refugee who will be there to share his family's story in exile, and IKEA has made a special 'house' just for him. You can also get a sneak peek at Design Week and see IKEA's redesign of the classic FRAKTA bag for the Swedish House Mafia. The difference is that this time the bag is a much cooler black.
It's just that I'm most interested in seeing the glittering 'egg' which resembles a disco ball of light that IKEA has made into a bed or sofa. Nothing further has been officially said about this blindingly dazzling contraption, and my only quibble is this.
Does this really not sting when you put it in your house?
Beyond the big names, unique designs
Big brands have been in business for years and have achieved the effect of 'once they bloom, the butterflies will come'. Designers, on the other hand, need more eye-catching ideas or more appealing concepts if they want to be remembered by design lovers around the world at Milan Design Week.
Slovenian female designer Lara Bohinc is here with a new piece of furniture that she designed with a sexy feminine based look. She has named this sexy chair Peaches so that you can learn about its inspiration from the undulating curves and folds of the seat.
▲ Lara Bohinc and the chair she designed
This lovely 'peach chair' is exactly what you'd expect. With this design, the designer wants to encourage people to accept their bodies, 'with all her flaws'.Lara works as a jewellery designer in a fashion industry that is ashamed of its obesity, but her years of experience in the industry have not assimilated her, but rather made her more respectful of women's flesh and wrinkles.
The work will be exhibited in an abandoned monastery, with a portrait of a former pope lining the display site - marked by modern progressivism replacing archaic values, with a sense of drama pulling through.
Of course it's not just feminism that's progressing, the idea of sustainability is also moving forward.
In Milan, "Metamorphosis" is no longer a documentary variety show, but a metamorphosis of furniture materials. Just as sneaker brands have already launched shoes made from marine waste, this sustainable trend extends to the home sector.
Italian company Paola Lenti first filled dozens of boxes with different waste materials, then sorted them by color, fabric type, and size, and finally sent the sorted waste to the Campana brothers in Brazil - both known for their iconic products made from scrap materials.
The final 'metamorphosis' of this cross-country collaboration made a rug, cushion and sofa. One of the most impressive is a patchwork effect carpet. Although made of waste material, it is very soft overall (even like a tentacle according to the on-site user experience).
And the flowers on those soft rugs are made from discarded materials of the same color, making the whole blanket both usable and beautiful.
▲ Blankets are special as long as they are color smooth
The chair has to be comfortable, either made of soft material that you can sink into or solid material that allows you to sit upright.
But as it happens, someone wants the chairs soft and hard.
The material of the chair designed by Johannes Budde is unusual in that the soft textile is then wrapped in a layer of concrete and the fabric remains hydrated and hardened for 25 hours, giving it the characteristics of being waterproof, fireproof, durable and pliable.
The design of this chair began with the designer's freedom to explore materials and discover the most appropriate presentation of the new material in the stool. That's the beauty of these design weeks - new ideas, new materials give birth to new ideas, and next year's design week might just see more thin concrete wrapped in soft fabric being made into new new furniture.
But while new materials can be found, new forms of similar products are something you can come up with on your own.
The "plusminus" luminaire designed by Stefan Diez for Vibia allows you to have a flowing light source.
Stefan, a German designer, had the idea four years ago to "liberate light from architecture", for which he tried to combine light sources with ribbons to make a flexible light connector that gives people different kinds of light. After years of research, there is a better solution for this liberated light.
The elegant braid replaces the original clutter of cables and wiring that needed to be installed in the wall. With the security of the braid, the light can be hung in areas of the room at different heights and can also be flexibly adjusted. It is no longer a static light that cannot be moved out of position for years after installation, but a mobile light source that you can design and modify yourself.
The theme of this year's Milan Design Week is 'Between Time and Space', which is more like a semi-proposed 'essay'.
From flowing lights to soft and hard materials, the designer changed the variation of lamps in the room and the material of the furniture itself to give it a different look than before. The peach chair and the 'house' made by IKEA for refugees can also see how our view of ourselves, our home and our dwelling changes as time changes.
Everything is special, new and transformative.