AD Magazin, Juni 2025 (auf Deutsch)
Exactly 60 years ago, during the nascent Salone del Mobile in Milan, Cassina presented an unusual new collection. The furniture itself, consisting of leather armchairs and a chaise longue all on shiny tubular steel frames, were very much au courant for the high-modernist tastes of the 1960s. The novelty lay in the fact that the designs were not at all new. Cesare Cassina had travelled to Paris to acquire their production rights from the archives of Le Corbusier, who together with Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret had designed the furniture in 1929. Back then, it had proved too far ahead of its time. "These pieces were so weird that nobody had dared put them in production," says Simone Farresin, one half of Formafantasma, the studio behind Cassina's showcase this year. "They were taken up by this suburban Italian guy, who saw that they were incredible and represented the history of design."
Cassina's initiative may have been one of the first instances of a furniture reissue, and it has certainly been one of the most successful. At the time, it was not common practice to peruse an architect's archives and put a decades-old, pre-war design into production. But Cassina's forward-looking founder spent the 1960s travelling around Europe and America, licensing designs that had languished in the drawers of Gerrit Rietveld, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frank Lloyd Wright. Many of these pieces became classics, and Cassina's evergreen catalogue grew into one of the most envy-inducing in the industry.
Six decades on, reissues have become de rigueur, as any visitor to the Salone del Mobile cannot help but notice. Alongside new products, furniture companies typically relaunch at least one design that dates from the 20th century. There was Staging Modernity, Cassina's celebration of 60 years of the Chaise longue à réglage, the Grand fauteuil confort, and Fauteuil dossier basculant, featuring limited new colourways. Lighting brand Artemide presented half a dozen reissues by Vico Magistretti, Gae Aulenti, Ettore Sottsass and Ernesto Gismondi. Its competitor, Flos, dedicated its Milan showroom to 90-year-old architect Tobia Scarpa, presenting Seki-Han, a wooden design from 1963, and a limited onyx edition of the Biagio table tamp from 1968. Scarpa was also in vogue elsewhere: two dining chairs from 1973, the Monk and the Africa, were reissued by Molteni & C and Tacchini, respectively. Molteni & C also exhibited an entire suite of small objects drawn from the archives of Gio Ponti.
Fashion brands also often choose to enter the world of homewares through a high-end re-edition. This year, Saint Laurent reissued four previously unseen furniture pieces by Charlotte Perriand; in 2024, the brand presented plates that Gio Ponti had made for a private villa in Caracas in the 1950s. Last year, Gucci made a splash with Design Ancora, a limited edition of archival Italian designs steeped in the brand's signature oxblood red. This year, Thonet asked Jil Sander to pick out new colourways and materials for the iconic cantilevered chair by Marcel Breuer. The list goes on.
There are many reasons why a reissue makes sense. Unlike, say, in the 1950s, people rarely furnish their homes all in one style, but choose to blend the new and the old. The demand is evident from the sky-high prices that almost any scuffed-up chair described as "mid-century" can fetch on the second-hand market. Putting some of those designs back in production can be seen as a way of democratising access. "Those that say, 'obviously, this is bad' are galleries that want to sell a piece of industrial design by [Jean] Prouvé for 200,000 euros," Farresin points out.
Most archives of modernist designers are brimming with drawings that were never realised, for one reason or another, but which might deserve a belated entry into the canon. Giampaolo and Emanuele Benedini, founders of bathroom company Agape, first worked with Angelo Mangiarotti in the early 2000s, when they commissioned the elderly architect to design three sinks. "At the time, there were tons of his designs that were no longer in production," says Emanuele. The brothers struck up a friendship with Mangiarotti, and purchased the rights to much of his archive after his death. Under a new name, Agapecasa, they have started reintroducing Mangiarotti's furniture "systems", which often have near-infinite possibilities of variation. This year, they produced the Eros, an all-marble table with a top slotted onto cone-shaped legs, for the first time as an oval dining table. "We are taking it slow," says Emanuele. "This work is also about valorising what already exists."
Another example of a refreshingly novel reissue comes courtesy of Saint Laurent, which rummaged through Charlotte Perriand's archives and found four furniture pieces that had never before been available to the public. A bookshelf, library and armchair had been manufactured as unique pieces for private homes, while the fourth piece had never been produced at all. At her desk, Perriand kept a small maquette of the Table Millefeuille, a round table made by alternating thin layers of rosewood and cherrywood, with the surface shaved down to reveal concentric circles of light and dark timber. The design was so technically challenging to produce that Perriand never figured out how to do it, until Saint Laurent finally did.
In most cases, however, a reissue is simply a way for furniture companies to play it safe. There is no need to wrangle with a designer, spend time and money on prototypes, or pay out royalties. Sometimes, it can create phenomenal commercial success. Cassina's Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand Collection still sells like hotcakes. A more recent blockbuster is B&B's Camaleonda, designed by Mario Bellini in 1970, which was relaunched for its 50th anniversary and briefly became the best-selling sofa in the world.
"We are in a very conservative time, and we have conservative design," says Farresin. "They reflect on each other." When a Flos showroom during Salone is given over to lamps dating from over half a century ago, it is a platform taken away from younger designers and architects, who might have presented new ideas. It becomes dizzying – and a little depressing – to think about the industry simply going around in circles, re-editing whatever celebrates a 50th anniversary that year. When it was born, modernist design was far too radical to be a commercial success; today, it is something safe to put out in case of a lack of new ideas.
"I hate mid-century design," says Jonathan Olivares, design director at Knoll. "I don't want to see it, I don't want to think about it, I can't live with it." It's no small statement coming from the American firm that sells many of the era's most ubiquitous designs, from Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chair to Florence Knoll's marble-topped tables. "Today, we are so distant from [that time] as a culture," he says. "They would have friends over and sit cross-legged on the sofa, all smoking cigarettes and drinking martinis, and that's just not how I want to be in my living room. They only had landline phones."
When Olivares arrived at Knoll, the struggling company had just been bought up by Herman Miller, and was trying to capitalise on its modernist legacy through reissues, re-editions, and anniversaries. The first thing he did was to ban all birthdays: "All you're doing is telling people you're old." Instead, Olivares started commissioning younger American architects and artists, including Jonathan Muecke, Johnston Marklee, and Willo Perron. "I broke the rearview mirror," he says. "This industry should think about how people live, interpret the culture, and move that culture forward."
That is not to say that Knoll no longer does reissues or re-editions, but they are now evaluated on strict criteria. The designs that have been brought back mostly date from the 1980s. "I've been looking at that era because it was completely swept under the rug," says Olivares. "As a company, you want to be able to say that you were doing experimental and interesting work in every decade." This year, Knoll reintroduced a side table by Joseph d'Urso from 1980. The designer had been inspired by Donald Judd and the Minimalist movement in New York to create a wheeled occasional table with a steel top and mirrored sides. "It would be ridiculous to ask someone to make me a minimalist coffee table, when we have the original," says Olivares.
Re-edits of classic models are allowed, but they are the results of in-depth research. The classic Barcelona chair, for instance, was only produced by Knoll in leather and chromed steel. "Now chrome is polluting water and killing people in villages, and it's a disgusting material," says Olivares. "What are you going to do? You're going to paint [the frame]." Speaking to Bauhaus experts, Olivares found that the students had originally also painted their furniture and upholstered them in textile, for the simple reason that they couldn't afford more expensive finishes. Last year, Knoll made the Barcelona chair available in painted frames and a wide array of fabrics. The re-edit was also intended to make people look with new eyes at the chair, which after all was originally designed for a private house. "Somehow, the Barcelona got sucked into corporate lobbies," says Olivares. "We want to bring it back into the home."
For the new finishes, Knoll didn't stick to monochrome and beige. The Barcelona now comes in a luscious Flamenco red velvet, as well as a bright racing yellow paired with a black frame. "It looks like a Lamborghini," he says. "This work is like remastering albums that are 70 years old, and because the technology is changing, it's not going to sound the same as it did." Olivares recalls something he was told by German designer Mike Meiré: "If you really love modernism and you want to keep it alive, you have to be willing to fuck with it."
In about as many words, it is what Formafantasma also told Cassina when they were asked to design an installation celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand Collection. The brand wanted the showcase at Salone to demonstrate how contemporary the pieces still are. "We all live and engage with these pieces, but it's not like a design from the 1920s is contemporary," says Farresin. "We told them that it is more important to reflect on them than to celebrate them."
Formafantasma came up with a scenography that arranged the furniture as it was originally presented during the 1929 Salon d'Automne in Paris, but set it against a backdrop of nature imagery, with faux foxes, deer, wild boars and wolves. "Le Corbusier considered the domestic space as a machine for living," says Farresin. "We thought about what would happen if everything he wanted to shut off were to invade that space." The installation served as the stage for a play, directed by Fabio Cherstich, where actors playing animals skewer the Modulor – a 183-centimetre male, Le Corbusier's conception of the standard human – and other vaunted hallmarks of modernism, pointing out, for instance, that chromed steel was initially invented to make bullets travel faster.
Instead of just showing an old chair in a new colour, Staging Modernity was a brave attempt to relate the ideas of modernism to the world of today, when there is a much wider understanding of the environment and humanity's role in it. At the same time, it made the long shadow of the 20th century a little more entertaining to live under. "These pieces represent a huge legacy that transformed our reality, for better and for worse," says Farresin. "It's impossible not to love them, and it's impossible not to hate them."