“Sartorial design. Elegance is the balance between proportion, emotion and surprise.”
Every material takes shape in our workshops. Skilled craftsmen and meticulous manual work create as many shapes as the materials have the potential to generate. The attention to detail reaches a level of obsession that only the hands of master craftsmen can satisfy.
Artisan is a word with many meanings: it refers to the concept of art as manual and spiritual skill, and is associated with the Greek word tecknè, “the art of knowing how to make”, of knowing how to create.
The dichotomy between the craftsman and the artist is played out in the opposition between creating and making. The focus is on renegotiating the boundary between art and design.
Our craftsmen interpret requests by drawing inspiration from what they experience, know and study. They realise the ‘non-reproducibility’ of the individual piece by making it by hand, with careful respect for tradition, but open to creative experimentation with every possible innovation.
“Experience is the teacher of all things”.
The references are undoubtedly the great masters: their work, which was avant-garde yesterday, is an object of desire today. However, the panorama from which we draw our inspiration does not only include recognised and recognisable hallmarks. There are pieces that are extremely interesting in terms of design or technical details, the result of creative contaminations that have no precise author: they are the anonymous masters.
Pier Giacomo Castiglione was the first to point out that it was often fairer to redesign a ‘modest, abandoned model’ by reviving it rather than designing a new one. And it is Dino Gavina who, with his ingenuity, puts the idea into practice, declaring: “These objects, better than others, can make us understand that great inventions are almost always linked to daily patience, to a manual skill learnt on the job in craftsmen’s workshops, over years of work and centuries of small improvements”.
The decision to respect the uniqueness of the pieces that tell of a historical moment, a place, an enlightening idea, is expressed in the UN\CUM collection, a selection of objects with a very high intrinsic value, unrepeatable, to be cherished and handed down.
