Tracing Identity for De Castelli
Italian furniture brand De Castelli only showed work by female designers at this year’s Milan Design Week.
Seven women were invited to design metal furniture for De Castelli’s booth at the Salone del Mobile this year. Titled Tracing Identity, the Italian furniture brand featured Alessandra Baldereschi, Nathalie Dewez, Constance Guisset, Francesca Lanzavecchia, Donata Paruccini, Elena Salmistraro and Nika Zupanc, who each reimagined hard materials as vessels for emotion, elegance and empathy.
Guisset’s Volte shelves, for example, combine wood and copper, aiming to prove how the latter can also be “warm and cozy, graceful and feisty”. The result is what the Paris-based designer calls “a totem, a sculpture”: two plump and smooth lateral wings holding the soft lines of the délabré-finished copper shelves.
Dewez uses De Castelli’s bending techniques to transform a thin copper sheet into a plissé cabinet door with “rhythm and feminine allure”. Lanzavecchia’s coffee tables turn copper, brass and iron into delicate brushstrokes. Zupanc’s copper cabinet references the sideboards where mothers lock up biscuits and candy for their children.
Two additional female-led shows were also presented by De Castelli. At their flagship store in Milan, Elisa Ossino explored the oxidation process of brass and copper with Color Rhythm. At the Nuovo Spazio Paola Lenti for Fuorisalone, the namesake designer showed metallic fabric made out of oxidised copper in a show called Tela.
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