Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli on curating Gucci Bamboo Encounters at Fuorisalone: ‘We didn’t want to produce commodities’

‘What does it mean for a luxury brand – a fashion brand – to enter the domain of design? That is the fundamental question,’ says Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, a former OMA partner and the founder of Milan-based interdisciplinary studio 2050+, who for this year’s Fuorisalone has united with Gucci on an ambitious new project.

His answer is ‘Gucci Bamboo Encounters’, which has seen Pestellini Laparelli draft seven international artists and designers to respond to bamboo – a foundational material for Gucci, and a longstanding motif in the house’s collections – in a series of distinct installations. They unfold during Milan Design Week 2025 in an exhibition, designed and curated by Pestellini Laparelli, at the 16th-century Chiostri di San Simpliciano in Milan’s Brera neighbourhood.

‘Gucci Bamboo Encounters’ at Fuorisalone 2025

‘Bamboo has been linked to Gucci since the 1940s,’ explains Pestellini Laparelli to Wallpaper* in the run-up to the exhibition’s opening. ’The iconic bamboo-handled bag was launched in 1947, which was an interesting story – leather was scarce after the Second World War, so they used bamboo from the banks of the River Arno in Florence. After that, it became a code: a pattern on clothes, jewellery, even home design.’

This idea of re-interpreation lies at the heart of the project, which asked the seven artists to respond to the project in an open-ended brief, which Pestellini Laparelli likens to a ‘research platform’ rather than an attempt to create saleable objects. ‘We told Gucci it wouldn’t be interesting for us to produce objects or commodities. We are drowning in objects,’ he smiles. ‘Nobody needs more objects.’

’Instead, we wanted to turn the project into a kind of research platform, around bamboo,’ he continues. ‘Not necessarily as a material per se, but: what does it mean from a cultural perspective? What does it mean across multiple geographies? It’s a plant that grows everywhere around the world, so obviously there are different epistemologies.’

As such, the artists and designers hail from around the world and span generations: there is Swedish-Chilean artist Anton Alvarez, London-based Palestinian artist and academic Dima Srouji, Dutch collective Kite Club, Rotterdam-based Austrian designer Laurids Gallée, Korean designer Sisan Lee and Eugenio Rossi and Yaazd Contractor’s The Back Studio, which is based between Turin and Mumbai. Finally, French artist Nathalie Du Pasquier – a founding member of the Memphis Group – is the only participant living and working in Milan.

‘We didn’t ask anyone to produce a chair or a specific object,’ says Pestellini Laparelli. ‘The point was to look at their practice through the lens of bamboo in general with an open brief. The objects they developed extended the codes of bamboo at Gucci, but in very personal, unexpected ways.’

Much of the focus remains on material. ‘Gallée, for example, is known for his work in resin,’ he continues. ‘So he invented a way to cast bamboo within raising blocks and then removing it, so you have these blocks in which bamboo appears as an excavation so you only see the “ghost” of it.’ A similar act of casting was undertaken by Lee, though in aluminium, while Srouji took found bamboo objects – a series of historic woven baskets – and ‘intertwined’ them with balloon-like glass adornments, hand-blown in Palestine.

‘She normally works in glass, and she produces glass objects in collaboration with artisans in the West Bank in Palestine,’ says Pestellini Laparelli. ‘She found a number of objects in bamboo, coming mostly from vernacular crafts – everyday objects, mostly caskets and baskets, and “hacked” them with the glass pieces. The result is something super beautiful – an everyday object changing function. But they also have a different layer coming from Palestine at this very historical moment; it changes the meaning of these objects.

Elsewhere, the Kite Club created a series of kites which flutter in the historic cloisters, featuring bamboo motifs as a ‘thank you’ to the material (‘without you, kite flying would not be what it is today... your strength, flexibility and lightness have been crucial to the development of kites worldwide’, they say), while Du Pasquier used the bamboo screen as a medium for her distinct graphic paintings. Finally, The Back Studio has created an intriguing object which mimics the extraordinary growth rate of bamboo (Chinese moso bamboo can grow up to a metre in a single day; The Back Studio’s accounts for about 0.6 millimetres every 15 minutes).

The show unfolds in a space designed by Pestellini Laparelli, which sees the Chiostri di San Simpliciano – a ’perfect square’, as he describes – divided in half through an intervention by his creative studio. As such, one half is a vast platform, on which the objects are displayed in a gallery-like setting; on the other, a dense bamboo grove. A modernist riff on the Renaissance pavillion stands in the centre of the space: ‘a perfect octagon in steel and bamboo,’ where a series of public talks will be held across the week.

‘We want to platform these designers – platform their research without delivering anything that can be simply sold on the market,’ he says. ‘These are all, in a way, research objects – research through design – that eventually we hope will lead to something else.’

‘Gucci Bamboo Encounters’ runs from April 8-13 2025 at Chiostri di San Simpliciano in Milan. A series of accomapnying talks can be booked here.

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