Nanda Vigo, a light artist who collaborated with the greatest artists of the 60s and 70s, died in mid-May, leaving the mark of her strong personality. The last exhibition at Palazzo Reale in Milan was a late and in the same premonitory tribute to her greatness.

I remember a beautiful and lively blonde girl who, while I was looking at my first experiences as an editor, first in Ottagono and then in Vogue, in the second half of the 60s, turned the more traditional Milan upside down by bringing you with her teammates, Piero Manzoni, Lucio Fontana, Enrico Castellani, and the great Gio Ponti, the effervescent wind of the avant-garde. It was with Fiorucci, a pioneer of all new things, that I met her, with a mixture of awe and admiration. She was strong, ironic, combative, in years when women still struggled to emerge in environments considered male. Artist, designer, architect? Each qualification was reductive for her. I found her in Nanda Vigo Light Project, the beautiful exhibition at Palazzo Reale curated by Marco Meneguzzo (summer 2019), the first anthological retrospective finally dedicated to her in Italy, after more than four hundred exhibitions around the world...

Superstudio restarts with GoLive the new project for live, streaming and hybrid events.
The largest space of Superstudio Più, the 2,500 square meters Central Point, is set up with a 24x3 m stage, a large 24x5.5 m led screen with a 2.6 mm pitch and a control station. The seats are spaced for 200 people present and the rest in live streaming. Superstudio is ready to play this new game and you? 

A preview of GoLive, on our Youtube channel Superstudio Tweb.

To visit the space and information: info@superstudioevents.com

The largest and most famous center for photography and image of Milan in almost 40 years since its birth has seen some beautiful ones, but never such a long period of closure as that required by coronavirus. Now it starts again with a safety protocol developed by consultants and technicians to ensure maximum tranquillity and professionalism and great Italian fashion is back on set.

We were the first center of photographic studios in Milan to close, when the lockdown was still in the air. We did it in spite of the business, but we considered it indispensable to protect the health of our customers and visitors, who we already felt heavily threatened. Two days later, all of Italy was locked. Today we were among the first to open and safely resume the activity in our 13 studio rooms. With all the necessary devices and attention to ensure a healthy and controlled environment, as required by law and even more, we start again. And here comes the first teams, models, creative people, technicians and assistants to animate the studios: with Moncler, Armani, Bottega Veneta, Versace, Off White… To name a few, the booking diary is filling up with reservations for editorial services and advertising campaigns. Which is a good sign because it means fashion begins to come out of hibernation and the expectations of the big names are high.

Her first approach to design was as a recent graduate at the inauguration of Design at Superstudio right beside Giulio Cappellini, who had sensed her talent. Step by step Ilaria Marelli has entered among the established contemporary designers keeping her fresh and curious approach to all the experiences that this entails, from the design of the object to the installations to the art direction, also touching fashion.

In your initial contact with Superstudio Design you were together with Cappellini for the first exhibition. What do you remember about that experience?
I remember perfectly well when we came to see the space - I was super adrenaline, it seemed to me an exciting challenge, many colleagues instead said "Giulio is crazy-how do you now two months from the Salone to put everything prepared back in play! "...well, he was right! Rivers of people in an area until then unknown to most, a wide-ranging setting and… there were also my first products! I remember the photo for the press together with Morrison, Wanders and Bouroullec, as if we were "au pair" designers, while I was a young graduate at the first approach to design… I still get excited about it!...

New entry to Superstudio Più. In the First Floor space, an open space of 700 square meters all glass overlooking the garden and via Tortona, Wave&Co arrives, a leading company in the sale, installation and repair of ultra-high-tech led screens. Manuel Maccioni is the young entrepreneur who brought to success in Italy and abroad the innovation of these tools, now indispensable elements for visual communication and the world of events, whether real or virtual.

"The field I deal with is that of cutting-edge and constantly changing led technology, able to create projects with an amazing visual impact, thanks to a very delicate element e as that of a pixel. It is an obvious manifestation of how, if you take care of every little gear of the mechanism, you can create something unimaginable. This type of technology is mainly used to bring fully immersive and engaging experiences to life, so that communication becomes the protagonist of the context.
In this regard, I am proud of the virtuous partnership that has been established with Superstudio and which is expressed in two innovative projects and in which I strongly believe.

A small green space has become the dream of Italians who have understood how smart-working and possible new lockdown would benefit. Many architects are already working to propose their solutions. The multifunctional proposal by Sandro Meneghello and Marco Paolelli, young and already established designers who concentrate a lot of their design on the outdoors, has all the characteristics to satisfy the most varied needs. Probably yours too.

"Balconies also have an important real estate value in the city", Marco Paolelli, of the Meneghello Paolelli Associati studio tells us, "We therefore asked ourselves why not work on a system that would enhance them easily, with a simple assembly and a wide versatility of construction". The health crisis that followed the project made all the spaces that allowed to be outdoors even more precious.Thus was born Urban Balcony, the project for Unopiù, recently presented in its first version but already engineered also in the "extended" version...

40 years ago, in March 1980, Donna was born, the magazine that renewed fashion publishing and became Vogue's most formidable antagonist, and would have been for many years to come. The story tells that in 1963 the designer and art director of an innovative and prestigious Vogue Italia was Flavio Lucchini, the same who 17 years later would have created the new magazine, once again able to revolutionize the image and communication of fashion itself.

This is the memory of the editorial adventure that generated Donna, an unforgettable magazine published by Edimoda (Rizzoli Group/Corriere Della Sera and later Rusconi) that spoke of new fashion, new ways, new worlds with an avant-garde cut that would make it contemporary even today. Its startling covers, always different, always provocative and punctual, highlighting the new Made in Italy (but not only). And other preferably Italian talents.  The collaborators are stellar: front-page journalists, writers, intellectuals, sociologists, artists. Very talented photographers, from Oliviero Toscani to other future stars such as Giovanni Gastel, Fabrizio Ferri, Paolo Roversi… 

Jacopo Foggini, more an artist than a designer, took possession of an unusual material, methacrylate, of which he fell in love when he was a child. He has made it the basis of his artisanal and exclusive production of beautiful, colorful, unique, theatrical, light and even gigantic objects. Free objects that follow the wings of the imagination and forged manually, with the material brought to more than 200 degrees. In 2004, he brought his dreamlike flowers with a soul of light and a monumental chandelier to Superstudio.

Where does the passion for methacrylate come from?
My passion for methacrylate, a material commonly used to produce machine reflectors, was born in family companies. One night, at the age of five, I snuck into the plastic materials factory and I saw a red drop of methacrylate coming out of the "nose" of one of the huge machines. Since then this material has entered my imagination, and like a seed, slowly over the years, it has grown to become my life. In the 90s I started to experiment with its creative use, fascinated by its chromatic and aesthetic qualities...

CLUB MILANO, popular bi-monthly free press magazine of lifestyle, fashion and design with interviews and insights, distributed in over 200 selected locations, interviewed Gisella Borioli on architecture, design, fashion, training and, above all, the future, which cannot fail to be led by the beacon of knowledge.

On the website of @ATAt, the quarterly online of Superstudio Group, you wrote an editorial that has a clear and direct title: "The new responsibility of architects". How important will these figures and, in general, knowledge and competence be once this health crisis is over? 
The focus of the speech is precisely this: knowledge and competence. The world is made of closed and open places, where we live and meet, where we work and compare ourselves. Competent people such as doctors, scientists or professors are basic because they solve the problems that surround us. The task of designing spaces where these people - and not only them, of course - can find answers to problems is the prerogative of architects. They are experts who do not work alone, in their studies many other excellences from different fields compare themselves...

The doubt is legitimate to follow the statements of the fashion big names, from Giorgio Armani to Alessandro Michele for Gucci, to Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent, to Dries Van Noten, to Alessandro Sartori for Zegna, the times and ways of the collections presentations must be rethought according to the creative visions of each, outside of catwalks and fixed appointments coordinated from above, more and more frenetic.

Slowing down is the key word that came out of the pandemic that will serve to redesign the future. Fashion bigs had a few months to rethink this increasingly accelerated system that forced them to a continuous flow of creativity, to churn out excess products, to a short-sighted marketing which could not see far, to an abnormal production that often created unsold intended for the parallel market. Slow-Fashion now takes its revenge on the Fast-Fashion that not many years ago has revolutionized the fashion world with ever new clothing at ever lower costs, filling the wardrobes but lowering the desire. It took the time of the #istayhome to look inside and wonder if the "so much", in all senses, had not really become too much...