Everyone wants Italian design. Once the preserve of architects, critics, and insiders, in recent years its historic products have gained wide recognition among a much broader audience. Time has given us distance, allowing a more critical look at its recurring cycles, its enduring traits, and the qualities that have etched themselves into collective memory. Lamps, armchairs, even cutlery become shared cultural images—“icons of Italian design” that tell the story not only of an aesthetic, but of a way of living.
Global events like Milan Design Week have amplified this awareness, but so have social media, fashion, and cinema. The result? More and more people want these design icons in their own homes.
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Another trend has overlapped with this rediscovery: second-hand culture. It’s not just about price. It’s about reuse, sustainability, and the special aura of objects that have already lived a life. While we were learning to recognize names like Eclisse, Superleggera, or Gae Aulenti, we were also—more slowly than elsewhere in Europe or the U.S.—getting used to wearing second-hand clothes. Today, pre-owned fashion has become mainstream, and the same logic has spread to furniture and homeware. Italian design, too, has found its way to Vinted. Best known as a platform for pre-owned clothing, it’s also a place where you can stumble across collectible furniture and decorative pieces.
On Vinted you’ll find pristine objects, gently used ones, heavily worn ones, and, as with clothing, the occasional imitation. A sharp eye, though, can uncover rarities, first editions, and discontinued pieces. The experience is more chaotic than on specialized platforms like Catawiki or Deesup, where items fetch auction-level prices. Vinted is closer to rummaging through stalls at a street market: less polished, perhaps, but with the thrill of unexpected finds.
Design that was meant to live in homes risks becoming a shelf-bound fetish, a nostalgic token of an era that draws us precisely because it’s gone.
This raises a central question: does the hunger for design icons reinforce their value, or does it risk hollowing it out? On one hand, the enduring vitality of objects designed even a century ago confirms the success of the original intent: to democratize intelligent, well-made design—a principle Italian design shares with Scandinavian design, which has also seen a resurgence.
On the other hand, there’s the risk of formalism: that shapes created to be used in daily life end up frozen as museum relics, bought, collected, and displayed purely for their form. Design that was meant to live in homes risks becoming a shelf-bound fetish, a nostalgic token of an era that draws us precisely because it’s gone.
To explore the phenomenon, here are ten examples of Italian design objects you might not expect to find on Vinted.
Opening image: The Nessino lamp by Artemide for sale at Vinted