This year’s Milan Design Week, held between 17 and 23 April, provided a window into high fashion’s newfangled world of the bizarre. A deck chair covered in foiled feather-like confetti was found at Loewe while Louis Vuitton fashioned a giant amoebic sculpture made (presumably) of metal—masterpieces from some of our favourite fashion brands. Admittedly, it would be slightly ridiculous to put chairs and high-end style together in a sentence but it cleverly works in the grander, inner schemings of the fashion world. A chair can just as easily be as much of a style acquisition as Jonathan Anderson’s frog-shaped mule, which appeared in the autumn/winter 2023-24 menswear show. Since then, the shoe has become a hot commodity, even for the sceptical editor out there.
On the subject of chairs, sculptural designs borrowed from interiors are high on the list of references that fashion houses and designers have often looked at. Consider Gaurav Gupta’s over-the-top sculpted confections. Or the nature-inspired interpretations at Vaishali S. A page in fashion’s history textbooks will remember Hussein Chalayan’s seminal autumn/winter 2000-01 collection, where living room chairs and tables transformed into dresses. Elsewhere, a fake Prada store in the middle of the Texas desert can attest to a similar architectural journey of embracing the ridiculous. Although the Prada Marfa art installation was not commissioned by the brand itself, the idea was perhaps appealing enough for Mrs Prada to lend items from the autumn/winter 2005-06 collection to window-dress its ingenious facade.
