Milan Design Week: Elective affinities at Hermès, Armani

Hermès, with its spectacular installation at the Pelota venue, and Giorgio Armani, exhibiting at the historic Palazzo Orsini, have been the main attractions at Milan Design Week, drawing scores of visitors each day, with long queues forming outside their respective venues. It may be a coincidence but, for the Milanese event’s 2024 edition, both luxury labels have focused on their elective affinities, highlighting the relationship between their furniture lines and their fashion collections, and their subtle, surprising similarities. Hermès’s design objects echoed items from its archives, while the Armani Casa collection did the same with the Italian label’s haute couture creations.
 

For once, Hermès jettisoned its usual majestic atmospheres, working instead with a more earth-bound, materials-based approach and a well-grounded setting, styled by Charlotte Macaux Perelman and Alexis Fabry, the creative directors of the luxury label’s home decoration division. Entering the Pelota, a historic venue in Milan’s trendy Brera district where Hermès established its base for Design Week, no item of furniture was initially visible. 

As visitors walked deeper into the huge, darkened space, they were struck by a stunning array of colourful geometric shapes laid out on the floor across the entire hall. Triangles and trapezoids filled with raw and baked earth, chipped clay, bricks, stones, wood, and adobe, in a palette of grey, ochre and sienna reminiscent of the colour scheme of an old jockey silk by Hermès.

Discreetly cached behind a black screen, which let a thin strip of light filter through, the label’s furniture and home decoration objects were ranged along an endless corridor, each of them matched with a corresponding item from the Conservatoire d’Hermès, the label’s archives. The effect was all the more stunning and captivating because the resulting matches were never used as a reciprocal source of inspiration, and were often designed in rather distant periods.

The idea was to find a correspondence between the items from Hermès’s new and recent home decoration collections with these treasures from the past. For example, the Derby basket made with leather strips is uncannily similar to a 1970 leather bracelet. The Derby calfskin bucket from the new collection is reminiscent of the 1949 Mangeoire handbag. The Pippa folding chair in raw cowhide from 1987 has its miniature match in an x-shaped cigarette holder made in the 1930s.

This year, Hermès has also focused on bedroom textiles, presenting a selection of throws, quilts and bedspreads available for the first time in large sizes, up to 2.8 m by 2.4 m. Each item was characterised by special fabric treatments and finishes, like a cashmere throw hand-woven with contrasting-colour bridging stitches, another in silk and cotton twill with machine-embroidered appliqué and a cashmere lining, and a throw in openwork embroidered striped cashmere.

After last year’s extraordinary success, Giorgio Armani has once again opened Palazzo Orsini to the public for the Milan Furniture Fair. The 16th century palazzo is home to the label’s headquarters, its design studio and haute couture ateliers. Like last year, a queue stretching over several hundred metres would form every day along via Borgonuovo, the street where the Milanese luxury label owns three separate buildings.

The mirror-lined halls on the imposing building’s first floor, decorated with ceiling frescoes by neo-classical painter Andrea Appiani, showcased the various themes of the new Armani/Casa collection, entitled ‘Echoes from the World’. Each theme’s set displayed Armani/Casa items alongside an Armani Privé haute couture creation, or looks from the label’s ready-to-wear archives, highlighting the similarities between Armani’s fashion and furniture collections. Both are in fact characterised by the same artisanal craftsmanship, and are rich in innovation and sophisticated details and finishes. The effect was impressive.

Armani has designed the showcase like a world tour, dedicating each set to a region or country, from Europe to Japan, China, Arabia and Morocco, and enhancing the sets with rare objects collected by Giorgio Armani himself in the course of his travels.

The Japan-inspired showcase was especially attractive. It featured an Armani look from one of the label’s most spectacular runway shows, displayed in front of a screen amidst a series of low tables. The look consisted of a trousers-dress with a sequin-covered wrap top from the Fall/Winter 1981-82 collection, inspired by Kagemusha – Shadow Warrior, one of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s most famous films.

A little further away, three lacquer-red Chinese-style dresses from the Armani Privé Fall/Winter 2023 collection were a perfect match for the lacquered wood lamps and boxes in the same hue set on coffee tables in black and white, like a yin and yang symbol.