Last month, during the five-day furniture fantasia that is Milan’s Salone del Mobile, anyone navigating the narrow Via Monte Napoleone was confronted by a scene akin to Alice in Wonderland. Here, jutting out in architectural style, the 73-year-old Philippe Starck had fixed some 160 chairs to the façade of the Dior store.
Resembling an elegant, extraterrestrial army, the installation celebrated what is, surprisingly, the first collaboration between the veteran French creative and the fashion house to reinvent Dior Maison’s archetypal Louis XVI Medallion chair. For a closer look, a few streets away at the opulent Palazzo Citterio, guests were guided down a darkened flight of stairs into a pitch black cavern, where all 24 iterations of the Miss Dior design were unveiled. Positioned on pedestals like stage stars as the balletic sounds of French composer Erik Satie (he, who first coined the term ‘furniture music’) remixed by the experimental Soundwalk Collective played out, Starck’s majestic Medallions were illuminated one-by-one.
