We The Italians | Italian design: Fattobene, Italian everyday archetypes

Italian design: Fattobene, Italian everyday archetypes

Italian design: Fattobene, Italian everyday archetypes

  • WTI Magazine #125 Mar 16, 2020
  • 1237

While I was working at MoMA, Emmanuel Plat - Director of Merchandising at The Museum of Modern Art - introduced me to Fattobene. At that time, MoMA Design Store was launching the first-ever pop-up shop outside of Italy with them. As an Italian, it was such a honor to see design from our beautiful country celebrated in New York. But, what is Fattobene? 

Fattobene, which means well made in Italian, is a platform dedicated to rediscovering everyday Italian objects that have existed for generations. The carefully selected collection of nearly 150 objects are all designed and made in Italy and pay tribute to Italian craftsmanship and timeless design. 

It was founded by Anna Lagorio and Alex Carnevali, who travel through Italy to discover special and unique items, like art déco soaps and modernist saffron packagings, old time candies and niche farmers' textiles that have been producing the same way for hundreds of years. 

“We launched in 2015 as a platform to rediscover Italian everyday archetypes. After reading their stories, many people started writing to us asking where they could buy them. So we realized that the distribution was very weak and decided to create a place to gather all these objects. Our desire for the future is for the shop to become a home for our material culture” says Anna Lagorio, journalist and co-founder of Fattobene. 

The aim of the shop is to create a place filled with well made objects that are able to pass the test of time, and often improve with age. The desire is to help consumers find alternatives to throw‐away consumerism. Fattobene looks for everyday objects from the North to the South of Italy, items that have been made in the same way, by the same people, for a long time. 

It was only a matter of time before it was discovered by MoMA. In fact, Fattobene shares the MoMA Design Store’s mission of exploring and promoting the meaning of good design. This is why the MoMA Design Store and Fattobene teams worked together to select an assortment of products that showcase classic Italian design and that have limited availability in the United States. The Pop-up, which took place last September in Soho, was a great success: New Yorkers loved every single piece of this timeless design collection. 

To find out more about this project, go check out their website.