Magazine Designer Star

Salone del Mobile 2024: Paola Navone tells twenty years of Ghost

29 April 2024

Paola Navone celebrates twenty years of the Ghost sofa, which she designed for Gervasoni, with a “party” for the eye, changing the look of this iconic collection and inviting consumers to “tamper” with it, transforming and personalizing it.

On the Salone del Mobile, the Gervasoni Milanese flagship store hosted a colorful and eclectic installation that reflects the designer’s creative proposal. Here Ghost was presented in a series of new versions which serve as an invitation to personalize it and imagine it in a different and bold guise. To feel it and give it another, memorable, twenty years of success.

What does it mean for a collection to turn twenty?

For a collection to be twenty years old means that it has been very successful. This sofa was born many years ago with the characteristic of having practically no volume but of being a structure dressed in a large shirt, a large T-shirt, and it was born white with a whole series of cushions, volumes, and shapes, in this beautiful white linen.

And it entered everyone’s homes with the idea that, like a chameleon, it changes its clothes, changes its personality. And it’s also a way to make the things you buy feel like your own, so you buy a sofa then dress it with a crochet t-shirt rather than with your recycled fabrics, with a wonderful blue cashmere and that becomes your sofa.

Perhaps the success of this sofa was precisely that of not having an imposed identity but of offering itself a bit like a guest to enter everyone’s homes and enter in a soft, non-aggressive way.

Can we say that your approach to projects is always a bit of a game between essentiality and eclecticism?

Yes, because it’s a bit of schizophrenic gymnastics: on the one hand in design we work for companies trying to make the most of their savoir faire to help them produce successful products, but on the other hand there is our eclectic nature which is made of antennas that go around the world, made of moods, of good and bad moods, of joy, of friendship, of mess whereby in the end the function meets with everything else and becomes a collection.

In this twentieth anniversary celebration exercise we wanted, exaggerating a little, to talk about the possibilities that Ghost still has today, twenty years later, of transforming itself into something unique, personal, customizable: completely different from the starting point, being the consumers many.

Does it also mean that today in general we are freer to express our style or is it an attempt to make us become so?

I have always pushed everyone, but with little success, to tamper with things a bit, but there is a sort of awe that one has and then the idea of buying a basic sofa and then perhaps sewing a frog on it might work or to draw on something, stain it, color it, put it in the washing machine with a dye, but people are still not so calm, they are afraid of damaging it.

In my opinion, however, it is worth giving new chances on the one hand, but also, on the other, to feel one’s own things. I have always pushed for this sort of disturbing perfection, when I do my interior projects I work largely in this direction, I bring together objects that come from different worlds even if consumers are not always willing to accept this. I hope that this celebration of Ghost’s twentieth anniversary will give another twenty years of life to this product because from now on I really hope that everyone will make it their own way and it can also be a way to make things stay in place for longer at home.