Take A Chance
Paola Navone dispensed with her possessions at Milan Design Week (image: Antonio Campanella).
The first time that designer Paola Navone and editor Spencer Bailey met involved an international cheese heist. It was September 2013, and Navone was in New York to launch a collection for US homeware brand Crate & Barrel. The brief had asked for anything you might need to have people over for dinner, and Navone took it seriously. “You need a table, you need the chair, you need the plates, the cutlery,” she says. “Everything you can imagine. So we designed everything.” Bailey estimates Navone designed in the region of 3,000 products. “It was a crazy, crazy project,” he marvels. Launching a dinner collection required a dinner, obviously, but Navone wasn’t simply going to hire caterers. She cooked for the 50 guests herself. “It was amazing, and I never forgot the taste of this pasta, in particular the taste of this ricotta,” recalls Bailey. “I’d never eaten ricotta that tasted like that in New York.”
It was only later, when they got to know each other better, that Navone revealed her secret. The ricotta didn’t taste like New York ricotta because it didn’t come from New York. “We flew it in at the last minute,” Navone admits. Her fixer in the city had promised her he could source fresh ricotta. “Fresh means made this morning or yesterday, not last week,” she laments, clearly unimpressed by the American approach to cheesemaking, with its namby-pamby regulations around pasteurisation. The fixer was late, and Navone was starting to plot her revenge against him for ruining her dinner (“I was going to kill him!”) when he arrived straight from the airport, clutching five kilograms of the freshest ricotta. “We all asked how he got it, but we got a fishy answer,” she says. “Maybe it was in a pilot’s bag.”
Left to right: Daniel Rozensztroch, Paola Navone, and Spencer Bailey.
It’s this commitment to detail – even if it involves cross-border dairy smuggling – that drew Bailey to Navone. “Something as simple as ricotta can be elevated and made extraordinary by reason of just simply taking that extra step,” he says. “It’s the same thing with her designs. There's always that little twist. There's always that thing that makes it different, makes it Paula, makes it the thing that you'll never forget.” Bailey, then editor of Surface magazine, decided to put Navone on the cover for Surface’s May 2014 issue. “It was at a time when I feel like everyone on the covers of American magazines was, like, 20 years old and a celebrity,” he says. It’s a fabulous cover. Navone, now 73, looks directly into the camera, her signature punky cropped silver hair artfully tousled and her chin resting on a hand adorned with a statement ring.
Of course, Navone was already a celebrity in the design world long before Surface made her their cover star. Following her graduation in 1973 from Turin Politecnico, where she studied architecture, Navone became a member of the anti-design group Studio Alchimia, where she exhibited alongside Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini. In 1983 she became the first recipient of the Osaka International Design Award. An apocryphal tale about her submission for the prize holds that she entered 50 of her pieces, instead of the requisite one, because she couldn’t choose a favourite. Five years later she founded her studio Mondo alongside the designer Giulio Cappellini. Notable Navone designs include the Ghost Chair for Gervasoni, so named for its playful white sheet-style cover, and the wonderfully fluffy Nepal Chair for Baxter, which resembles a very polite yak, if you squint. Today she is the creative vision behind Milan-based Otto Studio. A continuous thread through her decades-long career has been her love of travel, particularly across the Asian continent, and the inspiration she has found in non-Western design.
Objects from Take It Or Leave It.
Bailey and Navone went on to collaborate on a book, Tham Ma Da: The Adventurous Interiors of Paola Navone penned by Bailey and published in 2016. Then, in the autumn of 2022, she mentioned wanting to give away all of her meticulously collected archive all at once in an event at Milan Design Week. Bailey, now running his media platform The Slowdown, was intrigued – but concerned. “I was like, you can't do an exhibition where you just give away your stuff. Because it's not going to mean anything. Hundreds of people will come in and take everything, and in an hour it will be gone.” Keen to avert a free-for-all, he pitched a (highly controlled) lottery. Each item would be catalogued and assigned a number, then participants would draw a corresponding number to see what they’d won. Originally intended to contain around 600 or so pieces, they ended up with 1,000 items for the raffle. “I didn't anticipate how much crazy-making work it was going to be to attach a number to every single piece,” says Bailey. “But the team did it, and it’s been really a joy to watch how people respond.”
Take It Or Leave It, as the title suggests, offered players a simple dichotomy. They could take what they won, or leave it behind if they didn’t want it – or it was too large to fit in their cabin bag – to be re-entered into the draw. Clearly still haunted by visions of a chaotic supermarket sweep, Bailey was militant with the rules: pre-registration, six people at a time, absolutely no re-draws. Take it or leave it, no take-backs. Daniel Rozensztroch, former artistic director of Merci, lent his curatorial eye to the exhibition, arranging each item artfully by colour and theme, making the space at OTTO Studio in Milan’s design district feel more like a museum or a concept store than the site of a gameshow-esque giveaway. Of course, even with rules people found workarounds. “There were trades,” Bailey admits. “I do imagine some people will try to sell things that they take. That's human nature. But I think most people experiencing this, they're more interested in the generosity of the act.”
The designer gave away hundreds of pieces she has collected in her travels.
For most people, the idea of parting with single possessions is painful, let alone hundreds all in one go. But Navone feels that have served their purpose in her practice, and is looking forward to a fresh start in her creative environment. She didn’t buy any of them for their commercial value, but for the ideas for form or technique they inspired in her. “The fact of choosing something in the middle of garbage, or in the middle of other merchandise is an act of design,” she says “I am barely attached in the moment [I acquire them]. It means that it is going to produce something in my mind, in my heart, in my design,” she explains. “Then the relationship is finished.”
There is also the sense of an end of an era, where design is (hopefully) realising that European designers don’t need to reinterpret or reframe non-Western design to make it interesting to a global audience. There is a fine line between appreciation and exoticising, between finding inspiration as cultural exchange or repackaging it as appropriation. Navone’s drive to collect is clearly driven by an appreciation for craft and for colour, but collected and presented altogether without context flattens the distinction between design traditions from vastly disparate cultures, jumbling together Chinese lanterns and masks with Japanese textiles and ceramics. Without their origin stories, the objects are simply nice to look at, which is fine for a collection of spoons or a road sign, but weirder for a small bust of Chairman Mao realised in red velvet.
Visitors entered a lottery to win a piece they could take away – or leave behind.
Reassessing your things and giving away those that no longer serve obviously brings to mind Marie Kondo, the Japanese author and organising guru, but when the New York Times drew that parallel ahead of Milan Design Week, Navone claimed not to have heard of her. Is this a case of “I don’t know her” à la Mariah Carey and JLo? Or simple synchronicity? Either way, learning to part ways with things that no longer spark something, whether that be joy or creativity, clearly resonates deeply in a world increasingly overburdened with overconsumption. Because Take It Or Leave It is, for Navone, a statement on how she feels both her own personal priorities around design and those of the industry needs to change in response to its role in the climate crisis by constantly making more stuff. “I think this moment is a singular moment,” she says. “We have to find space. I want to sit down and think about the future. What is the future of this world? It’s going to change in a radical way.” Within this framework, Bailey positions Take It Or Leave It as a manifesto for how we can shift our concept of things that aren’t the newest or the shiniest. “I like this idea of re-materialising material,” he says. “Let’s look at what we have around us, celebrate that, honour that, and think about the act of giving is actually also an act of upcycling. We have enough things. There are enough chairs, enough objects.” He credits the book of essays Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua for crystallising this idea of finding hope in what can be an incredibly materialist event, which was explicitly founded to sell furniture. A homeware collection with thousands of pieces – like the one that first brought them together a decade ago – would likely hold less appeal to them in today’s context.
It would be easy for a designer of Navone’s seniority and stature to simply use this interactive exhibition as a retrospective disguised as an estate sale, yet there is a keen desire both to start a conversation about consumption and keep it going into the future. Take It Or Leave It may sound flippant, but there will be followup. Those who have chosen to take their object into a new life have been invited to keep in touch, and Bailey hopes to collect a series of photographs and stories about their new leases of life. As for Navone, she’s already moving on to her next creative project. She attributes her acquisitive yet free-flowing nature to her astrologic sign, the Pisces: she identifies with fish, swimming around, tending their coral reef but never settling. So significant is her passion for poisson her design practice, Otto Studio, even has .fish as its web address. Dressed on theme, she arrives at our interview with her wrists and fingers adorned with bracelets and rings made from bright orange plastic-toy goldfish. “I’ve lived in a mess all my life,” says Navone. “This is a rare moment for me to produce an empty bubble and start to think again.”
Words India Block
Photographs courtesy of Otto Studio