McCartney stages innovation exhibit at Salone del Mobile, enters interiors

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Jun 6, 2022

Stella McCartney’s Future of Fashion: An innovation conversation with Stella McCartney exhibit is launching at the latest Salone del Mobile furniture fair in Milan on Tuesday. Open to the public, it will run until 12 June and comes as the fashion label moves into the interiors arena.

The second edition of the evolving and travelling exhibition “leverages McCartney’s current achievements to inspire future actions”, we’re told. 

It mixes “cutting-edge fashion and design” and will also “introduce the conscious luxury pioneer’s first-ever interiors partnerships – including link-ups with Italian furniture maker B&B Italia and British wallpaper house Cole & Son”.

The company said the event being “a laboratory for design experimentation, innovation and cross-pollination” makes it "the perfect platform to introduce the creative change-makers of today to Stella’s solutions for our shared tomorrow”.

The exhibit was originally unveiled at the UN’s COP26 climate conference in Glasgow and “invites the world to discover the limitless possibilities of material innovation for creating a more nature-positive market”.

Visitors will find curated items from McCartney’s design history, as well as recent innovations such as the new Frayme Mylo bag created in partnership with Bolt Threads. Areas of focus are vegan, mycelium, regenerated and plant-based material innovations.

There’s a materials innovation pop-up shop, along with “larger-than-life fungi sculptures” and an immersive infinity room.

And visitors will see the interiors collabs that include working with B&B Italia to reimagine its Le Bambole armchair, upholstered in the Summer 2022 collection’s hand-drawn Forest Fungi burgundy print and made from conscious materials. 

As for the Cole & Son link-up, the fashion brand’s Summer 2022 hand-drawn Fungi Forest toile de Jouy print has been reinterpreted as burgundy and navy wallpaper. It has a substrate derived from 79% renewable fibres and a manufacturing process using 30% less greenhouse gases than traditional non-woven wall coverings. That makes it the most sustainable wallpaper to date for the luxury interiors firm.