The Proust armchair, perhaps Alessandro Mendini’s best-known masterpiece, is a hymn to the ability of objects to transcend the ordinary. The use of pointillism as a way of distorting a simple armchair, enriching it with layers of meaning that recall an elsewhere made up of memories and suggestions, is also demonstrated by the 100% make-up Proust vase, originally made in two pieces for the exhibition “Italy - Germany 4:3 / 50 Years of Italian and German Design”, held in Bonn in 2000, and now reissued in a limited edition of 999 pieces. The name of the vase, which is not a coincidence, is a reference to a previous collection from 1992, for which 100 designers and artists had redecorated Mendini’s masterpiece creating 100 original versions.

Merdolino was the first project to ironically legitimize an everyday taboo object, the toilet brush. Presented in 1992 and an immediate success with the public, Stefano Giovannoni’s Merdolino uses a narrative form and an expressive use of plastic to make it look like a bean sprout growing out of a plant pot. The current re-edition, in 999 pieces, exasperates the paradox embodied by the short circuit between manure and preciousness with an unprecedented golden finish.

A challenge to go beyond the boundaries of the usual and the possible. This is what is embodied in this new version of the centrepiece designed by Susan Cohn in 1992 during a workshop at the Centro Studi Alessi. The use of two steel meshes is a reference to the old wire mesh cabinets in which food was once stored, and when the light passes through the two superimposed mesh surfaces, the effect is amazing.

These well-known corkscrews by Mendini, emblems of the personification of our tableware, change clothes to wear the Galla Placidia decoration, designed by Mendini in 1984. Anna G. and Alessandro M. thus embody a hymn to hybridisation that bridges the gap with both fashion and the references to the high culture of our art history.

According to Alberto Alessi, the company is “an industrial research laboratory that engages in a continuous mediation between the immensity of creative possibilities and the needs of the public, or as I prefer to say, the dreams of the public”. To exemplify the laborious work behind the scenes that has always accompanied the search for this complex balance, Alessi came up with the fine idea of presenting two versions of two legendary objects that have never gone into production, Richard Sapper’s 9090 and Aldo Rossi’s La Conica. In the first case, the coffeemaker is presented with a new perforated handle painted red - the only fetish colour used by Sapper in addition to black and white. For La Conica, this new long-handled version was the first that Aldo Rossi presented to the company.

Never actually put into production, this kettle designed by Achille Castiglioni in 1995 was inspired by the granite stone that curling players take turns sliding on a sheet of ice. Castiglioni’s ironic exercise, in this case, is double: on the one hand, he transposes the reference context from cold to hot, and on the other, he uses a dialect name - Bulbul, “it’s boiling, it’s boiling” in the dialect of Milan - to express astonishment.

The emblem of an iconic design that minimises the object’s function at the expense of its aura and prestige, Starck’s famous lemon squeezer - which is not a spider, but rather a squid at a restaurant on the island of Capraia - is brought back to life through a study that embodies the borderline between its potential appreciation by the public and its denial. This is a grey area that no one can know as well as an entrepreneur, and with this version of Juicy Salif, it seems to come alive in its darkest side.