MILAN, Apr 18, 2010 / — To celebrate design week in Zona Tortona, against the post-industrial backdrop of Stone Island’s Milan showroom at 54 Via Savona, two great Italian firms measure themselves, literally fusing together in a project whose raison d’être is change: the ability of iconic products to adapt to a world that increasingly changes at a rate we are unable to control.
Commonly renowned objects have been torn from their natural habitat and placed in a new, unusual context.
Metamorphosis launches a process of critical reflection to seek new outlooks finally open to change.
Aldo Petillo, with Andrea Dichiara, has created a link between Stone Island, which has always been a lodestar in materials research for clothing, and Zanotta, a prestigious international design firm.
The metamorphosis of the celebrated Zanotta ‘Sacco’ chair, designed in 1968 by Pietro Gatti, Franco Teodoro and Cesare Paolini, becomes a body to dress and a place for dialogue.
The “Pure Metal Shell” jacket, previously exhibited in the Pompidou Centre in Paris, “Hand Painted Camouflage”, “Graphite” and other iconic garments resulting from Stone Island’s research have been turned from functional-wear into the outer skin of a new generation of products.
The pieces are unique, as dictated by the Stone Island approach, yet can be used and interpreted in many different ways, just like the original chair.
Each object is neither a Zanotta ‘Sacco’ chair, nor a Stone Island jacket, but a METAMORPH, similar to a sculpture, yet without all the difficulties of volume and perception that the sculpture presents.
The seven metamorphs are designed to “mentally” interest onlookers and relate to their modes of perception.
The primary force of expression of the material with its physical properties – hardness, malleability, fluidity, reactivity to light, weight and colour -, together
with the bean bag chair’s overall capacity to create form independently, as if the intervention of the person using it were secondary to the level of comfort it provides on sitting.
Aldo Petillo’s studio has always focused on projects that go beyond the mere design of an attractive shape. The design is always the result of a multidisciplinary approach that includes everything from Strategic design and continuous research into materials, finishes and colours, to experimentation with unusual technologies. Together with Andrea Dichiara, this time the goal was to create a fusion of tradition and innovation, form and function in order to obtain ideas and impulses for a new approach to design.
METAMORFOSI Overlapping identities
April 14 – 19, 2010
Showroom STONE ISLAND
Via Savona 54, Milano
