Each year, T’s editor in chief, Hanya Yanagihara, commissions a different artist or designer to create an installation on the grounds of the Villa Necchi Campiglio, a grand 1930s-era private home turned museum in Milan. The occasion: a party to celebrate the beginning of the city’s annual Salone del Mobile design fair. Past artists have made trompe l’oeil cities and fantastical flower gardens. But the idea for this year’s iteration, overseen by the American sculptor and designer Misha Kahn, 35, was simple: “The concept for the party,” he said, “was ‘party.’”
Villa Necchi as a context is so buttoned up. The architecture is so rigid and careful,” said Kahn. He wanted to contrast the Rationalist aesthetic of the building, designed by the architect Piero Portaluppi, with what he called “rowdy balloons.” Just inside the property’s wrought-iron gates, he arranged a cluster of outsize inflatables — covered in colorful patchwork fabrics supplied by the Milanese textile brand Dedar — that variously resembled puffy lampshades, lightbulbs and chandeliers.
It wasn’t the first time Kahn, who is based in New York, has experimented with inflatables. “We once made them in the studio using bedsheets and fabric dye,” he said, referring to pieces he produced for a 2018 installation of oversize abstract forms at the Hotel Americano in Manhattan. The artist’s surrealist furniture is defined by outlandish shapes seemingly untethered from function and convention. His 2023 exhibition “Staged” at Friedman Benda gallery in Los Angeles featured a tapestry whose motifs were partly inspired by a chewed piece of gum. During Milan Design Week, he’s also showing his Azimuth series — square, wall-hung mirrors surrounded by vivid halos of ceramic and enamel — and launching carved wooden chairs as part of his new homewares line, Abject.
When the party guests — among them Nadège Vanhée, the creative director of Hermès; Simone Bellotti, the newly appointed creative director of Jil Sander; and the artist and designer Laila Gohar — began arriving on Monday night, Milan’s dreary wet winter had only just given way to spring sunshine, and a slight chill still hung in the air. But there was also a hint of Italian summer, thanks to the bartenders of the seaside hotel Il Pellicano — celebrating its 60th anniversary this year — who had traveled to Milan from Tuscany for the evening.
As the sun set, spotlights illuminated Kahn’s sculptures, making them appear as if they were glowing from within. Snacks and drinks were followed by teardrop-shaped chocolates from the Milanese pastry shop Sant Ambroeus, as well as shots made with spinach, cucumber, mint and spirulina provided by the skin-care brand Humanrace. Around 9:30, a breeze swept through the villa’s gardens, catching the ribbons trailing from the inflatables and making them sway.
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