Alessandra Facchinetti designs Circle, the new Editions Milano collection

4 April 2022

Established designer, creative director of prestigious fashion brands, Alessandra Facchinetti tirelessly cultivates her vocation to experiment, exploring new creative horizons. She left her mark and led to the evolution of brands such as Miu Miu, Gucci, Tod’s in which she created collections that tell her way of declining and living elegance in an essential and daily way. This vision returns in her first collaboration with Editions Milano from which Circle was born, a breakfast service with unprecedented but surprisingly harmonious proportions. The circle is the shape around which every element of the collection comes to life, designed to evoke visual but also gestural beauty, almost an invitation to bring elegance into the interactions with even the simplest objects that we use in our daily life. Elegance as a value, as a lifestyle and not just as a way of presenting oneself to others. After all, in Circle, the absolute protagonist is porcelain, whose technical characteristics have been explored by the designer and artisans of Editions Milano to achieve the enchanting final result.

What is the formal inspiration of the Circle collection and in particular of the large circles that characterize it?

Circle was born from the idea of ​​working on new geometries trying to associate the absolute purity of porcelain with unexpected lines and geometries, not least the circle as a handle. The idea of ​​the circle came at the end of the design. I was looking for that disturbing element that would however create that perfect harmony of shapes. I was looking for the imperfection that I found with the most perfect shape, the Circle.

Was it technically difficult to shape the porcelain to achieve this result?

It was not easy, because porcelain has a process that is difficult to associate with such detailed geometries, precisely because it is a manual work, and therefore with all its irregularities. But thanks to the work of the artisans we managed to get what I wanted. This is the nice part of this work, the exchange between two different worlds that find a perfect balance even in the execution.

Is the Circle collection designed for special moments or is it an invitation to make everyday life special?

The Circle collection was born from the idea of ​​representing the breakfast ritual, one of the moments of our daily life that marks the beginning of each of our days, creating objects that could tell the rituality of our daily life with harmony of shapes.

The crossover between fashion and interior design is increasingly recurrent: perhaps there is a desire for coherence and rapprochement between these two aspects of life?

In my case, I love design in all its forms and I have always taken care of every aspect of my work, contaminating fashion, design and art, which have always been my great passions. Today, homeware has also contaminated the world of fashion because I believe it adds and completes the aesthetics and the world we want to tell. There is certainly a great deal of attention to lifestyle. I tried to keep the same approach that I have in fashion also in design. I work on shapes and details obsessively, I focus on the interaction they have with the body, and every object or dress has it.

“The way we touch an object influences our gestures”: how important is gestures in elegance?

Gesture is a fundamental aspect for me, and also a great inspiration. It can be extremely elegant by defining an important nuance of our personality, it tells a lot about how we are. Also for Circle I worked a lot on gestures, the circle gave me the opportunity to create a different interaction, a new way of touching an object.

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