About Last Night: T Magazine Celebrates Salone del Mobile – The New York Times

T’s annual Salone del Mobile celebration, which took place around the poppy-ringed swimming pool of the Villa Necchi Campiglio in Milan last night, was no ordinary garden party. As they drank Negronis, guests picked bouquets inside a hot pink stilted pavilion filled with alliums, thistles and lilies, wandered through a colonnade draped with swaths of Dedar fabric and bounced through an interactive step and repeat that evoked rolling turquoise hills — a fantastical landscape created by the Dutch design duo Studio Ossidiana. T’s editor in chief, Hanya Yanagihara, had invited the designers to bring the inventiveness of their recent Prix de Rome-winning project — in which they reimagined the Sixhaven area of Amsterdam as a floating playground — to the party (a model of that design was also on display inside the villa). “The idea was to turn it into a festival marking the beginning of spring,” Giovanni Bellotti, one of Ossidiana’s principals, said of the event. “And to reflect the springtime rituals around seeds and flowers that you see across different cultures,” added his partner, Alessandra Covini.

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While guests included Olafur Eliasson, Raf Simons, Jonathan Anderson and India Mahdavi, the stars of the evening were undoubtedly the 12 pastel-painted piñatas, shaped like abstract plants and otherworldly farm buildings and filled with chocolates; petals from the Milanese florist Potafiori; and surprise gifts from the likes of Frette, Molteni & C, Bocci and Smeg. Guests attacked these enthusiastically with Ossidiana’s custom-made color-blocked sticks, several of which were broken in the process. “Man, the traffic in Milan isn’t that bad,” joked the curator and former Design Miami director Rodman Primack. “This was way more intense than I expected,” Bellotti said with a laugh. Luckily, all the guests came away unscathed, and the party rollicked on into the early hours.