Shortly before the maverick Italian designer Enzo Mari died in 2020, he donated his archive to the city of Milan with one condition: it must remain closed for the next 40 years. It would take at least that long, Mari argued, “before we have a new generation that is not as spoilt as today’s generation and that will be capable of using it in an informed manner”.
Those who don’t want to wait four decades should hightail it to the Design Museum in London, where a sprawling retrospective of Mari’s work is on show – perhaps for the last time in a generation or two. It is a fascinating and infuriating portrait of this self-styled contrarian, a fiery prophet of doom who carved out a career of contradictions. Mari was a lifelong Marxist who railed against the indulgent “pornography” of the design world, arguing tirelessly for workers’ rights and the democratisation of design. He was hailed as the “conscience” of the industry; the grumpy thorn in the side of the establishment who could be relied upon to hurl colourful insults at his contemporaries (“publicity whores!”), between puffs on his cigars.
