Milan, Italy

As the design world recovers from COVID 19, the Salone de Mobile has announced that the event’s new dates will be September 5-10, 2021.

A special event at this year’s Salone will be called “Supersalone” and directed by Stefano Boeri making it a “unique, unprecedented, unmissable edition also because it is linked to the moment we are living,” states Stefano Boeri , now the curator.

His “Supersalone,” the special event of the Salone’s 59th edition, to be held at Fiera Rho, Triennale di Milano, the first post-pandemic after two missed appointments (April 2020 and April 2021), anticipates the 60th edition of the Salone scheduled for next April by just seven months.

It will also be the first major international public event for the city of Milan.

The new dates – from 5 to 10 September 2021 – and above all a new format which, explains Boeri, “takes up the DNA of the Salone with the great challenge of opening up to the public and looking at the postwar trade fairs, episodes in which families came from all over Italy, an extraordinary experience that has given the country an enviable international position.”

For the new format, five designers will work alongside Stefano Boeri: Andrea Caputo, Maria Cristina Didero, Anniina Koivu, Lukas Wegwerth, Marco Ferrari, and Elisa Pasqual of Studio Folder.

This first large design exhibition to open its doors promises to reaffirm the centrality of Milan and the Salone del Mobile.Milano on the international design, cultural and innovation scene.

Carefully selected by Mr. Boeri on the basis of their abilities and skills as designers, curators, installation and graphic designers, the team will gather round the table and work with Giorgio Donà, co-founder and director of Stefano Boeri Interiors, pooling openness, enthusiasm, awareness and rigour in a bid to come up with innovative itineraries that will valorise projects and products in setting built on proximity, reflection and sharing.

The proposed format will be that of a large design library, which will celebrate the renewed attention and care devoted to contemporary living spaces, designed to valorise and harmonise the new products and creations brought out by the companies over the last 18 months with their traditional products which, thanks to the debut of the Salone del Mobile.Milano digital platform will be available to purchase at the culmination of a packed and engaging customer journey (part of the profits will go to a charitable cause).

The layout will consist of long parallel sets, designed for the specific goods categories, and will allow the companies to narrate their own identities and their own products on vertical walls and, in some cases, on horizontal surfaces, both of which will be modular.

This fluid and dynamic exhibition set-up will allow visitors to navigate freely inside a huge national and international archive of creativity, excellence and savoir faire.

With circularity and sustainability uppermost, all the display materials and components have been designed to be dismantled and reused. Furthermore, thanks to the Forestami project, a green welcome area with 200 trees, will be set up at the East Gate of the fairgrounds.

The trees will subsequently be relocated to Milan’s metropolitan area after the six-day event.

The display in the fairgrounds will be cross-pollinated and broken up by themed areas and itineraries devised by Studio Stefano Boeri Architetti and the five co-designers: arenas for talks on knowledge sharing and deepening, dedicated lounges for commercial and business company meetings, areas reserved for young students at design schools and for a display of chairs awarded with the Compasso d’Oro curated by the ADI, food courts conceived and set up in partnership with Identità Golose – The International Chef Congress, and socialising and relaxation areas.

A special programme of meetings with some of the leading figures on the contemporary scene and thinkers of tomorrow will alternate with large live music events, in collaboration with the top, most representative sectoral experts. A different way of conceiving the exhibition space, allowing it to become a place with multiple opportunities for interface and, simultaneously, an invitation to stop, think and feel and, therefore, an antidote to the hasty trivialisation of so many exhibitions.

Triennale Milano will be the hub of the “supersalone” city, with a range of cultural offerings including a series of totally original projects on top of the institution’s exhibitions.

“The ‘supersalone’ is the result of the generosity and the creativity of the companies and design professionals at an extremely delicate point in the recovery and relaunch of the economy and culture.

For the first time, the Salone del Mobile.Milano will be open throughout to the great consumer public, allowing them a chance to select and purchase the very best international design products. Thanks to the joint efforts of thousands of producers, professionals, retailers, technicians, workmen, display specialists, designers and fans, for six days the Rho Fairgrounds will once again be the epicentre of international design. I would like to thank FederlegnoArredo and the Salone del Mobile.Milano for their confidence in me and for their co”urage in being determined to honour such an important appointment,” said the architect Stefano Boeri.

In this context, the combination of digital and physical presence will make for a highly engaging experience. The new Salone del Mobile.Milano platform, which will launch on 30th June, has been designed to promote the design on exhibit with original content and medium-specific language, and to put the user at the centre of the event before, during and after their visit. The exhibition spaces and themed itineraries will dialogue with the platform in a wholly original manner, and the products visualised and reserved for later purchase. It is a digital crossroads that will create new forms of integration and interconnection between different worlds, users and markets.

Claudio Feltrin, President of FederlegnoArredo, had this to say: “Taking on the challenge of organizing a special event – a “supersalone” – in such a difficult and complicated year is a tangible sign of the extent to which our entrepreneurs and the Federation have poured their hearts into overcoming the obstacles in order to bring the design community, the national and international buyers, the media and the general public back to the Rho fairgrounds, allowing them to take part in a globally unprecedented event that only the city of Milan is capable of hosting. An extraordinarily different event, suited to a unique period in history in which the leaders find the strongest stimuli to demonstrate their own leadership.”

“Giving up would have been easy, but that’s not part of our companies’ DNA. Any other sort of initiative would just have been a poor imitation and it was our duty to preserve the success story that has seen the wood-furnishing sector, and all its companies, become one of the undisputed standard-bearers of Made in Italy around the world: a one-off built on professionalism, far-sightedness and what I would describe as a sartorial ability to conceive and imagine spaces and furnishing.”

“We are well aware that September’s will be a different sort of edition and, given the current
exceptional circumstances, it could not have been otherwise, but if there is a common thread that ties it to the Salone del Mobile. Milano. It is the indisputable quality of the products on show and the prestige of our brands, which will be enhanced and valorized by the exhibition layout designed by Stefano Boeri and the specially-selected curators, added Feltrin.

“I am quite sure that the result will be amazing, and I should like to thank all those who, from Fiera Milano to the local, regional and national institutions, have been and will continue to be by our side during this adventure. The design companies are ready to return to the international scene stronger than ever, and the September event will be the best possible way of announcing to the world that our sector is firmly in place and keen to embrace new challenges.”

Maria Porro, President of Assarredo, commented: “The current trend reassesses the centrality of our homes and the need to invest in the places in which we live, to rethink private and communal spaces by designing durable furnishing, based on the new logistics triggered by the current situation”

“The September event will be an invaluable opportunity for the companies to present their 2021 products that have not yet been exhibited. At a time of huge change, the ability to reinvent will be the main driver of this unique edition which, thanks to tremendous teamwork, will be the event that signals not just the recovery of our sector, but that of the country as a whole.”

“A live, shared event at last, an opportunity for the design sector to focus all its energies on best expressing the quality that sets it apart. Quality that needs to be experienced”, added Porro.

“We have learned over the last few months that we can no longer do without a digital presence, and the innovative Salone platform will be a tremendous opportunity for the companies, a new medium designed not just for presenting products, but for offering services, underpinning and closely interacting with the physical event, a great shared home in which Made in Italy design can unveil its ongoing research and innovation to the world.”

“Supersalone” – a unique project in line with the exceptional times in which we live, geared not just to sectoral professionals and the international design community, but also to the general public, who will have access to the fairgrounds for the entire duration of the event. This is how the Salone del Mobile.

Milano intends to serve as a promoter of and catalyst for activities, thoughts and feelings that will allow the entire sector and the supply chain as a whole to get off to an optimistic new start in September.

With the news, among the novelties, on June 30, there will be an opening to the public of a digital platform to reserve the exhibits and a flexible wall instead of the stands.

The products, physically present in the Rho pavilions, will send a QR code to a digital catalog and will be bookable online.

The display method has also been reformulated: no longer for stands , but through an “intelligent, flexible and equipped” wall, where companies will have their own space and identity, but must also necessarily coexist.

Its creator, Andrea Caputo, defines it as “a long vector surface, an infrastructure to cross that changes the rules of the game.”

Between wall and wall, a series of common areas – a project entrusted to Giorgio Donà, director of Stefano Boeri Interiors – is conceived as a collective space at the service of companies. “A small city”, says Boeri, where a part is dedicated to schools, with the exhibition “Lost graduation show” curated by Anniina Koivu, while a series of meetings (declined in lectures by the great masters; thematic meetings; and conversations between the companies, all managed by Maria Cristina Didero) completes the cultural proposal.

There will be an exhibition dedicated to the Compasso d’Oro and we are thinking of a way to re-propose a mini SaloneSatellite, curated by Marva Griffin and as always dedicated to the youngest. At the end of the event, then, it is expected that all the set-up materials can be disassembled and reused, an aspect that Lukas Wegwerth took care of.

Finally, the graphic and coordinated image project was entrusted to Studio Folder by Elisa Pasqual and Marco Ferrari.

The connection with the Triennale, of which Stefano Boeri is president, will be close. The Triennale will be the international city hub of the Supersalone, the gateway to the city, with a purely cultural proposal distinct from the exhibition offer. And the Fuorisalone?

“The relationship between Salone and Fuorisalone is a unique feature of Milan,” continues Boeri.

“We must not lose this uniqueness and synchronicity of an event that has a commercial profile, in this case also open to the public, combined with a city that opens up and becomes a meeting place, commercial exchanges and cultural events. No other city in the world has it.”