Some call it “copycat”, while others “air du temps”: since you can’t rule over it, it spreads and “pollutes” the moodboards of all creative people with the same references. In any case, the most amusing part in summing up every Salone event is discovering the analogies that, like a spider web, join all design expressions, even the most extreme. By demonstrating the circularity of fashions and languages, at times by chance, often through speculation that follows the same twists and turns: and of the same object, or set design, they offer a classic version alongside a more modern one, or even the same one. Like all trends, these relationships have no scientific basis. Yet with the decisiveness of revealed truth they offer an indication of style that, though bizarre, presents all the immobility of a rule, to which, despite our resistance, it is a pleasure abdicating, if nothing else but because it’s new – even if it’s a comeback – and exciting and reassuring.
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From using a (real or printed) fan as a decoration accessory to breaking all decency in a safe-proofhome with sharp-edged shelving. Plus, the ascertained fact that nothing beats the glamour of a vintage column basin, if not for age then for form; that there’s no souvenir of a distant nation that beats the one from Milan – but a design one, that is: be it in the form of Minerva matches or a plate with the Duomo and royal crown; if in the past polypropylene film, also known as Mylar, was an amusement park material, maybe it’s time to see it from a different angle; that a helium balloon is thegame par excellence; that if you ask an interior designer for a house ready to be lived in (plus a peep hole hidden behind a painting), this surely isn’t perversion, but a different way of seeing a well-furnished room.