MCM launch a new collection at this week’s Salone, with Atelier Biagetti and Maria Cristina Didero
Since its founding in 1976, MCM has been consciously setting itself apart from established luxury fashion, and they continue this with their new collection, launching at this week’s Salone del Mobile in Milan.
That new collection – one winkingly aware it’s out of place – is the Wearable Casa Collection, made by Atelier Biagetti and selected by Maria Cristina Didero.
Atelier Biagetti is a collaboration between Alberto Biagetti and Laura Baldassari – their work together sets out to subvert assumptions about objects and behaviour, reorienting our relationship to the constructed. MCM chose them for their “unique disruptive attitude”, according to Chairperson Sung-joo Kim.
Design writer and curator Maria Cristina Didero has been thinking and communicating about those relationships for more than 20 years. For her, the collection, the latest in a series of collaborations with Biagetti and Baldassari, works in narrative. She highlights its “ironic and original design associations and visual short-circuits”. The goal of the project is to use those senses of invention and irony to present new objects openly.
Those objects are: Tatamu, a transformable combintion of rolls and mats, a form based on the Japanese Tatami featuring Bauhaus colours; Mind Teaser, an interlocking series of pieces that can form a stool, chair or table; Clepsydra Lantern, a portable lamp for when it’s too dark, with a lampshade that doubles as a hat for when it’s too bright; the Space Cabinet series of bags with alternate functions as a mirror, cabinet and exercise wall; the Magic Gilet, wearable storage designed after Dorothee Becker’s Uten.Silo; finally, a pet backpack to sit around a pet and on the back of its owner.
It starts in Milan, presented today at the Palazzo Cusani, but will go broader. All of the objects are designed to be portable, and there’s a parallel virtual event that’ll run beyond the room itself.
Part of the thinking behind the collaboration is an appeal to a new generation; one that’s online, and one that’s open to seeing objects and the world around them in new and unexpected ways. This Wearable Casa Collection hopes to meet that sensibility, and cement MCM’s rebellious tendencies into the future.
