Ferruccio Laviani has a dry, masculine and sober style, yet in the collective imagination he is essentially identified with one of the few projects in which he has allowed himself a few more "frills": the Bourgie lamp by Kartell, which is one of the company's most famous and also best-selling icons. But looking at the collaborations made with other companies: from Emmemobili to Molteni&C , passing through Foscarini, we understand that his style is very different and much more complex from the “neo-baroque” that has often been attributed to him. An attentive interlocutor for Italian companies, he enthusiastically recounts the response given by the sector to the pandemic crisis: “All the companies I work with are working on new projects and all are eager to do things. Consider that all the companies were in the process of putting into production what would be presented at the Salone del Mobile and although there was not, in May and June we started talking about new projects. Everyone has rolled up their sleeves and everyone is doing something and this is an aspect of Italian companies to which I owe a lot. Because they encouraged me to go ahead and have new ideas ”. On the cover Ferruccio Laviani with the  Taj lamp he designed for Kartell .

Is the public role of the designer something you find stimulating or useless?

I believe that unfortunately (or fortunately) many of us also represent a tool for companies to promote their products. A sort of modern advertising that is also done indirectly for companies. Then there are the more shy ones but we are all a bit part of this world, so taking away would also seem a bit anachronistic to me. Everyone decides what kind of self-image to convey. As for me, I have never had a very close relationship with social media and I got a little more entangled in Instagram that I feel closer to my way of thinking. I feel it is a little more mine and I manage it myself and I use it more like a notebook for notes than a page for me to see. And I try to be the most honest with who my real person is and to do the same with social media. Then it happens that I do a particularly clever post and maybe there are five likes and then I post a picture of me in which I'm shining my shoes and there are five hundred. In the picture, the  Evolution sideboard by Ferruccio Laviani for Emmemobili .

Evolution by Emmemobili

How was your relationship with Kartell born and how has it evolved over time?

It was born quite randomly. At the time Claudio Luti took over from his in-laws (Giulio and Anna Castelli, founders of the company, ed.) and asked a number of designers to make proposals for a stand at the Salone del Mobile, and he chose mine. Those were the years in which I had opened my studio leaving the company with Michele De Lucchi, I began to work occasionally with Kartell, at the time the corporate organization and the business were not what they are now, the company was practically reinventing itself from scratch, with a catalog of five products. And now, after thirty years of collaboration, I am working on the new catalog and the products are five hundred. In the picture, the  Bourgie lamp designed by Ferruccio Laviani for  Kartell

Bourgie by Kartell

Yet, despite this Kartell catalog being very large, there are two of his projects - Bourgie and Kabuki - which have had an exceptional circulation. What, in your opinion, has determined this numerical success?

Certainly when Bourgie came out it was perhaps a product that was missing on the market. It was 2003 and post-minimalism dominated, we were working on something completely purged of any type of decoration, also in reaction to the hyper-decoration and color that had dominated the 80s and early 90s. So even at a cultural level it was a lamp that was placed in a way that others have defined "neo-baroque". It was a phase of my life like this. It was the first time that Kartell had given me a larger budget to design a lamp, it was the second year in which Kartell had started making lamps again. As always happens, one thinks of ten thousand things and then in the end I remade a lamp that my parents had on their desk but thinking of making it in plastic. And the amazing thing is that every now and then I look at the original designs and that lamp went into production exactly as it was first designed. It was a success probably because at the time no one thought of such a lamp, it was a transversal lamp because the fact that it was made of plastic made it ironic on the one hand and therefore liked by the youngest but on the other hand comfortable from a design point of view, compared to other extremely minimal or futuristic lamps of the time. The first year, I think seventy thousand lamps were sold and two molds were made because we couldn't make it with one. And when I thought about doing Kabuki it was a bit like the idea of seeing Bourgie again fifteen years later. It was an important object for Kartell and still represents its iconography. And we are still on about twenty-twenty-five thousand pieces a year. In the picture, the  Kabuki lamp designed by Ferruccio Laviani for  Kartell

Kabuki by Kartell

The collaboration with Kartell therefore began with the design of the stand for the Salone del Mobile. In the last period there have been no fairs and companies have found alternative solutions: is it possible that this has questioned the importance of events?

It goes without saying that with digital, distribution is taking on a very different scope, but there are things that cannot be sold online. It is one thing to sell a lamp, which you may already know, and another is to sell a sofa. Certainly digital will take hold more and more but this will not neutralize the physical store which may become something different. But I don't think one can replace the other and I think the same is true for fairs. Digital can help the company to tell its story from an iconographic point of view, in its visual universe which, however, is completed with the real part. The fairs will be there, maybe they will be downsized and will coexist with a new way of proposing themselves. I believe that this experience helped us to take stock of what the company is and its way of communicating.

Is it true that perhaps we lived so far away that we had almost forgotten the possibility of staying indoors that it had become the place to sleep and has now returned to the center of our attention?

I think it is a change very much linked to the architecture of the house. Never before have extendable tables been sold as in this period, because you had to eat there but also work. So we understood that we need to rethink objects as both designers and users. But the real problem is related to the architecture of the houses, for example I am thinking of houses without a balcony, or of houses in which there is no privacy. Therefore, to review the ability to design houses as places where one can live. In the picture, the  Brique-T table by Ferruccio Laviani for Emmemobili

Brique-T by Emmemobili

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