Now, Gucci’s Bamboo Encounters exhibition at the Chiostri di San Simpliciano during Milan Design Week 2025 invites a contemporary reassessment of the storied plant. Featuring artists and designers from around the world, the exhibit reframes bamboo not merely as a traditional element but as a symbol of adaptability, resilience, and beauty—a dialogue that echoes Gucci’s own historic embrace of bamboo, beginning with the Bamboo 1947 handbag almost eighty years ago (!).
Throughout the exhibition, contemporary creators offer varied interpretations of bamboo.
Anton Alvarez’s towering sculpture transforms bamboo into a fountain-like monument to natural force and structural defiance, while Dima Srouji’s Hybrid Exhalations quietly honors anonymous artisans’, blending ‘ woven bamboo baskets and fragile hand-blown glass...
Now, Gucci’s Bamboo Encounters exhibition at the Chiostri di San Simpliciano during Milan Design Week 2025 invites a contemporary reassessment of the storied plant. Featuring artists and designers from around the world, the exhibit reframes bamboo not merely as a traditional element but as a symbol of adaptability, resilience, and beauty—a dialogue that echoes Gucci’s own historic embrace of bamboo, beginning with the Bamboo 1947 handbag almost eighty years ago (!).
Throughout the exhibition, contemporary creators offer varied interpretations of bamboo.
Anton Alvarez’s towering sculpture transforms bamboo into a fountain-like monument to natural force and structural defiance, while Dima Srouji’s Hybrid Exhalations quietly honors anonymous artisans’, blending ‘ woven bamboo baskets and fragile hand-blown glass. Dutch collective Kite Club turns their gaze to the history of kite-making, engineering a machine to lift nylon and bamboo kites into flight.
The sense of bamboo as both a workhorse and a refined medium runs through pieces like Laurids Gallée’s Scaffolding, which abstracts the material’s supportive strength into cool, architectural calm, and Nathalie du Pasquier’s PASSAVENTO, a lyrical folding screen marrying bamboo’s rigidity with silk’s softness.
The show reaffirms bamboo’s place in contemporary practice—not only as an ancient plant, but as a living material symbolic of both tradition and reinvention.
The home of 18th century monastery in the Regola district, 500m from Rome's new Ponte district. Photo via @salvalopez
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Raphael, Self-portrait (1506–08). Florence, Uffizi Galleries, Gallery of Statues and Paintings. Photographic Cabinet of the Uffizi Galleries – Courtesy of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism.
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Auguste Renoir, Study for The Great Bathers (1884 to 1887). Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum.
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Photograph by Erich Höhne. Courtesy of Deutsche Fotothek.
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Franco Maria Ricci in 1984, at the launch of FMR U.S.A. at the New York Public Library.
Caverns were probably the first labyrinthine structures human beings came into contact with, in a distant past. And I, too, rummaged through my own past, finding a version of myself as the guise of a young amateur speleologist, equipped with the right clothes, flashlights, ropes, and climbing-irons. I was a second-year student at the Faculty of Geology and, with some friends, I had founded a so-called Cavern Society. My weekdays moved along on the surface, in the sunlight, while my weekends were usually devoted to the dark bowels of the earth. Text by fmr. Read More
