Hot on the heels of Poltrona Frau’s successful collaboration with British fashion designer Ozwald Boateng, the furniture maker has partnered with Italian brand Fornasetti on a limited 50-piece run of its iconic ‘Vanity Fair’ armchair. Released as part of ‘Imagine’, Poltrona Frau’s first collection of the year, the monochrome piece is upholstered in instantly recognisable celestial, dreamlike illustrations: a large sun with a human face and moon instilled with anthropomorphic qualities rise over dreamy clouds.
The surreal designs were sourced from Fornasetti’s rich archive and were originally hand-drawn by Piero Fornasetti in the 1950s. They have been creatively re-interpreted by his son, Barnaba who is now Fornasetti’s artistic director. ‘Even as a young child, people used to tell me that I had my head in the clouds,’ Fornasetti explains. ‘So I replicated the clouds from an old print in my bedroom and used them as wallpaper and decoration on various objects. The sun, with its face and stylised rays, is one of the themes my father interpreted obsessively, to the point that it became a Fornasetti icon.’
The collection intends to marry Fornasetti’s creativity with Poltrona Frau’s longstanding commitment to craft and innovative manufacturing techniques. ‘As two paragons of Italian craft and creativity, the meeting of minds between Poltrona Frau and Fornasetti was a natural choice,’ Poltrona Frau recalls. ‘On one hand, the artisan know-how of more than 112 years of furniture making, on the other, the incomparable spirit of creativity that manifests when the imagination is left to run wild,’ it continues.
Each piece is further enhanced thanks to a special silkscreening production technique which involves using frames to digitally print the illustrations onto the leather. While this process is commonly used in haute couture fashion for leather accessories, it is the first time Poltrona Frau has used it for its furniture. The result is that the hand-drawn illustrations are imprinted with unprecedented precision, making them really sing.
The ‘Vanity Fair’ armchair first went into production in 1930 and has since become embedded within the fabric of Poltrona Frau. It has undergone numerous iterations and a string of prolific designers have re-imagined the chair including Roberto Lazzeroni, who was tasked with producing an updated version to celebrate its 90th anniversary, (£10,800), poltronafrau.com; fornasetti.com
