Involving Domus editors and contributors, we put together a list of 20 objects: physical and digital, auteur and anonymous, mass-produced or limited editions, not necessarily released this year but all of them sharing the common feature of having somehow marked this 2022, a lacklustre year only in appearance. In spite of the no-logo wave that had raged at the beginning of the millennium, this year’s portrait was crowded with brands once again dictating the course, determining the resonance of certain objects, and obtaining from the high refinement of certain objects an increase in their own reputation, as in contemporary textbook cases such as Apple and Balenciaga: a perfect self-feeding mechanism.
The 20 objects that defined 2022
Anonymous and branded works, material and immaterial, technological and symbolic, all of them relevant to our present and telling the story of our expectations for the future: here are the objects that Domus has stored in its time capsule from this year.
Courtesy Wikicommons
Courtesy Bottega Veneta
Courtesy Rolls Royce
Courtesy Gucci
Courtesy Apple
Courtesy Citroën
Courtesy Wikicommons
Courtesy Alessi
Courtesy Samsung
Courtesy Balenciaga
Courtesy Zanotta
Courtesy SumUp
Courtesy Lime
Courtesy Wikicommons
Courtesy Coperni
Courtesy Ferrari
Courtesy Blackleaf
Courtesy Swatch
Courtesy Flos
Courtesy Wikicommons
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- La redazione di Domus
- 21 December 2022
New modes and anniversaries
There have also been multiple short-circuits, between past and present, as with the Arco lamp that turned 60 without ever having left the scene, and between past and future, as with the 50th anniversary of MoMA's Italy the new domestic Landscape exhibition that featured Mario Bellini’s Citroën Kar-a-Sutra, half a century older than the Ami quadricycle, another Citroën telling the story of an era, our own era to be more precise. A survey sponsored by the Oxford English Dictionary has stated that the expression of the year 2022 is “goblin mode”: in the words of Italian magazine Rivista Studio, the “right to be disgusting when everything around is”. More specifically, a reaction to the artificial positivity and compulsory flawlessness of personal image sought in previous years, especially in the social media sphere. We see this in many aspects and especially in how the way we dress is changing: the boundary between formal and informal is increasingly blurred, in quarantine we have discovered that working in overalls is perhaps more comfortable, and some technical clothing items, which we used to relegate to sporting activities or outdoor excursions, are now part of the urban outfit: as if the mountains had descended into the city, fleece jackets and hiking boots have appeared more and more frequently.
A year looking ahead
Above all, 2022 has appeared as a year looking towards the future. We have globally faced scenarios of extremely high political and geopolitical tension, where even anonymous objects like a pair of scissors have taken on the value of a fighting statement. We have spent a year talking about the metaverse, only to realise that we do not yet have the right devices for a mass access. We have seen the NFT phenomenon grow by leaps and bounds and then shrink. Meanwhile, in parallel to this hiccupping digital acceleration, we have been dredging up Y2K aesthetics and indie sleaze sounds from the close early-millennium past. Still with a view to the future, this year we emerged from chain quarantines due to Covid-19, but we’ve also had one more tangible sign of an even greater challenge for humanity. Water, the one to be notably absent during a whole summer of drought in climatic belts that had never suffered from it, has rang the alarm bell of climate change even louder. Energy has then systematized all signals and efforts, translated into the immediacy of an everyday object such as the utility bill, in the large scale of hydrogen engines or PVs becoming entire architectures, down to the minimal and plausibly viral scale of those other photovoltaic panels, that might soon be equipping a multitude of small devices, such as Samsung’s new remote controls.
- la redazione di Domus, Silvana Annichiarico, Giovanni Comoglio, Lorenzo Damiani, Bianca Felicori, Andrea Nepori, Lorenzo Ottone, Matteo Pirola, Romina Totaro e Giulia Zappa.
In a year marked by unprecedented protests in Iran, one object is the global symbol of women's rights claims in the Middle Eastern country, where cutting one's hair becomes an act of rebellion against the government and repression.
Gaetano Pesce's collaboration with Bottega Veneta resulted in four hundred resin chairs, all alike but all different from each other. Like human beings, similar but different. A tribute to diversity: a strong, clear and political message, conveyed by an object designed by a master for the brand on which Kering is betting so much.
Rolls Royce and EasyJet join forces and unveil a hydrogen engine that could become the benchmark for aviation between now and 2050, the symbolic target date for the global goal of net zero carbon emissions. In fact, hydrogen does not produce carbon dioxide, but water, when used as fuel. This engine is a prototype that has particular importance given the many criticisms for the use of air transportation, private jets in the first place, because of the impact on the environment, and because of the large increase in airfare prices.
The jacket designed by Alessandro Michele and presented during the Gucci SS23 fashion show pays tribute to FUORI! (Fronte Unitario Omosessuale Rivoluzionario Italiano), Italy's leading militant organization for gay rights founded in 1971. The jacket, which reproduces the cover of the anthology dedicated to FUORI! by NERO Edizioni, captures the dominant culture's rediscovery of a fundamental part of civil rights history, but it has also been widely criticized for turning a fundamental page of activist history into a commodity.
Apple's headphones had been met with coolness and some sneers at launch: more expensive than average, with unusual lines and materials, and oversized. This year they became ubiquitous, thanks to their unique audio performance, and a trend ignited by personalities such as Dua Lipa, Bella Hadid, plus endless tiktokers and influencers, becoming one of the symbols of the Y2K aesthetic.
In 1972, Mario Bellini's Citroën Kar-a-Sutra concept was presented at MoMa among the environments of “Italy: the New Domestic Landscape”: it was a car-not-a-car, a residential hybrid that had very little of the motor vehicle. Half a century later, it is another Citroën that stands out as part of the new urban landscape: tiny and essential, electric, rentable with a Netflix-like monthly subscription: it is the object that represents a new model of mobility.
Squared, two-dimensional, two-tone yellow and blue, the flag goes viral when Russia invades Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Simple as a digital icon, it is the global symbol of the first war we followed live on TikTok and Instagram.
999 copies of a unique object: a set of personal cutlery, not a service, held together by a ring. They are designed for Alessi by Virgil Abloh, who passed away in late 2021. From the lines are essential, they come across as a noble version of the camping set, with an eco prepper that inescapably ties them to today.
The new remote control by Samsung needs no batteries but recharges using the available light and turning the router's radio waves into energy through RF charging. Narrow and tapered, it integrates a solar panel on its back. According to the Korean company, it can avoid disposing of nearly 100 million spent batteries within 7 years.
In collaboration with Danish audio masters Bang & Olufsen, Balenciaga reimagines the bag as a hybrid, stylizing the lines of the fashion house's iconic It bags in solid form and twisting their function by integrating a speaker. The result is a functional sculpture of lambskin and metal, mirroring the post-Covid years obsession with fashion accessories and the popularization of always-on portable speakers.
Superstudio's table was put into production by Zanotta in 1972, symbolically crowning Italian radical design as a season of rupture and transition between modern and postmodern, between different relationships of design and production. Simple in its materials, honeycomb wood and laminate print, it gives precedence to communication over technique, deriving directly from the Continuous Monument and the Supersurfaces of the late 1960s, true idols of the radical revival of recent years.
The popularity of this little white box is a reflection of something that is instead disappearing, cash, supplanted by cashless payments by card or directly from the phone. SumUp is symbolic of this momentous shift, a portable device that allows anyone to cash out using just a smartphone.
Citybike nearly doubles the number of electric bikes for sharing in New York (9000), Barcelona is ready to roll out its new all-electric AMBici service, and Lime's red-green ebikes, after its acquisition of Jump, are rampant in Europe's major cities, becoming a mobile part of street furniture.
“Wordle” is the most searched word of the year on Google: a digital object of disarming simplicity but with an essentially perfect game design. The New York Times acquired it in early 2022 to integrate it into its site, thus crowning it as the heir to the crossword puzzle in the 21st century.
A sprayable dress is not only an innovation in the field of dematerialization (although it is a fiber for all intents and purposes, although not woven), but also a new horizon of gestuality and poetics. This was demonstrated at Paris Fashion Week by designers Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant of Coperni, making a fabric materialize live on Bella Hadid’s body.
With a name that is at once hyperbole but also paradoxical, Ferrari has launched a vehicle with the least Familienähnlichkeit - family resemblance - of anything seen coming out of Maranello from 1947 to the present. An ultra-luxury SUV, the first 5-door, 4-seater Ferrari. With Purosangue, the Cavallino Rampante dilutes its identity with a car that embraces market trends, but still remains a Ferrari.
First launched in 2020, Merrell's Hydro Moc can be considered the design that paved the way for the exponential rise of polyurethane and 3D-printed clogs, which became new footwear status symbols during 2022, but also signaled the increasing integration of technical and technological elements into how we dress.
The debut of the watch born from the collaboration between Omega and Swatch was greeted with long lines outside stores, the first in the post-Covid era for a non-first commodity. MoonSwatch is a collection of bioceramic wrist timepieces that pay homage to the Speedmaster model and especially to Omega's Moonwatch, the first watch worn by an astronaut on the Moon. There are eleven different colorways, each dedicated to a planet or satellite in our solar system, including its star: the Sun.
In 2022 the lamp created by Pier Giacomo and Achille Castiglioni for Flos turned 60 years old, along which it has never left the scene, becoming an absolute of design, almost an archetype, the image automatically associated with the word “lamp.” The sought-after simplicity of its form and technology (the marble base, the telescopic arch in U-shaped steel profiles, the double adjustable dome) have remained virtually unchanged throughout 6 decades of production, and have earned it a huge success celebrated this year with the Compasso d'Oro Career Award as an undisputed long-seller. A limited edition, Arco K 2022 , was produced for the anniversary, with the base consisting of a crystal block.
From those fired in Ukraine, often with customized inscriptions “to the recipient”, to space launches, with giant rockets soon to be used for tourist flights for a very few super-rich people, the rocket is an object we have seen in abundance this year and in some cases would have gladly done without. The modern rocket myth turns one hundred years old in this very decade: the symbolic date with which it coincides is the release of Fritz Lang's 1929 film Frau Im Mond, The Woman on the Moon.