MILAN—In 1947, amid postwar material scarcity, Gucci turned to bamboo for its handbag handles: light, strong, bendable, and practical. Although its sustainability as a textile depends on manufacturing processes, bamboo is a rapidly renewable resource that grows without pesticides, requires little water, and regenerates naturally without replanting. Physical iterations like furniture and utensils offer highly eco-friendly alternatives to wood and plastic.

Italy’s long affection for bamboo can be found everywhere, no less in Franco Maria Ricci’s Labirinto della Masone, the sprawling bamboo maze outside Parma, that stands as a testament to its endurance and poetry.

Gucci’s Bamboo Encounters, staged at the Chiostri di San Simpliciano during Milan Design Week 2025, invited a contemporary reassessment of the storied plant. Featuring artists and designers from around the world, the exhibition reframed bamboo not merely as a traditional element, but as a material of adaptability, resilience, and beauty, echoing Gucci’s historic embrace of bamboo nearly eighty years ago.

Throughout the exhibition, contemporary creators offered varied interpretations of the evergreen plant. Anton Alvarez’s towering sculpture transformed bamboo into a fountain-like monument to natural force and structural defiance, while Dima Srouji’s Hybrid Exhalations honored anonymous artisans through a blending of woven bamboo baskets and fragile hand-blown glass.

Dutch collective Kite Club turned its gaze to the history of kite-making, engineering a machine to lift nylon and bamboo kites into flight.

The sense of bamboo as both workhorse and refined medium ran through pieces like Laurids Gallée’s Scaffolding, which abstracted 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 reaffirmed bamboo’s place in contemporary practice, not only as an ancient plant, but as a material whose svelte sustainability has long been part of its unique beauty.