Milan, Italy

Proust Vase is the brainchild of Alessandro Mendini, a world-renowned architect, artist, designer, and theorist, as well as a long-time friend of the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design.

This extraordinary object is manufactured by Alessi who celebrates art as a crucial component in making design, and as an intrinsic and signifying value of its products.

Art is the value represented in the second project of the Alessi 100 Values Collection. Its testimonial is the 100% make-up Proust vase, presented in June 2021.

100% Make-Up Proust Vase with Lid’s design has been awarded a 2021 Good Design Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.

“I have always thought that design is a creative discipline originating from art and poetry,” states Alberto Alessi, President of the Company, “it is needed to bring a little transcendence in today’s consumer society, to separate between function and emotion, to set off surprise, and to stir feelings through the beauty of our objects.”

Hence, the object is chosen to represent this value could only be the 100% make-up Proust vase, originally crafted in two pieces for a show in Bonn in 2000 whose title is “Italy-Germany 4:3.

Fifty years of Italian and German Design” now re-edits for Alessi’s centenary in a numbered edition of 999 pieces.

This vase ideally joins the collection coordinated by Alessandro Mendini in 1992 titled “100% Make Up” which sees 100 authors hailing from diverse artistic and creative fields, imagine a personal decoration for the same vase, designed by Mendini himself.

The 100% make-up Proust vase provides an extraordinary interpretation of the celebrated décor originating from a trip in the French writer’s homeland, during which Mendini feels a connection of an artistic and cultural nature between the author and Parisian pointillists.

Hence the expressive spots patterns that often come up across several objects bred from the eclectic activities of this unforgettable master of Italian design.

This is a preciously-crafted object–the cone-shaped base and cover are decorated in hand-applied pure gold leaf, which is then fired and finally cold-brushed–and a unique one, as it is realized through a production process that is halfway between industry and craftwork that entails the lightest variations in shape and in the color of the decorations.

The preciousness and uniqueness of the 100% make-up Proust vase and its limited edition make it an object of utter desire for fans of Alessandro Mendini and seekers of unrepeated or limited-edition objects, who are creating their own private design gallery.

The 100% make-up Proust vase comes in the special packaging created for the Company’s centenary, exclusive to the objects of the Alessi 100 Values Collection: a range of new and particular projects with which Alessi wishes to celebrate not only this important milestone, but also the beginning of a new century of challenges and experimenting in the field of applied arts.

Project: 100% Make-Up Proust Vase with Lid
Designers: Alessandro Mendini, Atelier Mendini
Manufacturer: Alessi SpA.