How High Fashion Does Furniture In 2021

At Design Miami, the avant garde furniture fair that sets the stage for home decor trends to come, a household fashion name, Fendi, took a center booth. Their exhibition, titled Kompa, featured ten works from the mind of Peter Mabeo, founder of Botswana's Mabeo Studio. There was the “Chicara” credenza, a wavelike woven cabinet with drawers; the “efo” stool, a piece that reshaped the iconic Fendi “F” in clay and Panga Panga wood; the Maduo Chair, which took inspiration from jewelry designed by Delfina Delettrez Fendi. Mabeo took creative meetings with Fendi artistic director Kim Jones, Silvia Venturini Fendi, and Delettrez Fendi in Rome, where broad strokes for Kompa were born. Then, he traveled throughout Botswana to employ artisans and their specialized techniques to help execute the collection, from wood carvers, to potters, to weavers. Oftentimes, multiple people from varying regions lent their hand to one piece—with Mabeo’s vision melding it all together. The result? A collection that served as an homage to the storied Italian fashion house while also showing off the African country’s exquisite craftsmanship—proving that innovative, collaborative design can be accomplished across borders and cultures.

“The whole idea was to bring different people together,” Mabeo told Vogue. “I prefer to engage people who work in different types of material, are from different geographical locations, and have different mentalities. It’s less ‘Oh, here’s what I want to do’ and more ‘Okay, let’s see what we can come up with.’”

A few miles away in Miami’s Design District, Louis Vuitton was showing off its Objets Nomades, their collection of travel-inspired objects. New this year? An outdoor furniture collection by Frank Chou. His curved, colorful pieces, upholstered in both Louis Vuitton waterproof and Paola Lenti fabrics, were inspired by the terrace fields of China’s Yunnan province and the curving canyons of Arizona’s Antelope Valley. The store’s fourth floor had completely turned into a showroom, courtesy of Patricia Urquiola. In addition to Chou’s work, there were new hanging cocoons and meringue poofs from the Campana Brothers, as well as petal chairs by Marcel Wanders Studio. “It’s meant to be a flower that blossoms,” creative director Gabriele Chiave told Vogue, also noting the design was inspired by the flora motif on Louis Vuitton’s iconic monogram.

Meanwhile, over in Italy, Dolce & Gabbana released a trove of objects in early December from their debut home collection, Casa. It featured dinnerware—colorblocked Murano wine glasses, blue-and-white patterned plates—as well as textiles like zebra-print pillows and leopard throws, all easily order-able online from Farfetch. A week earlier, Altuzarra announced their first foray into the textile space with sustainably made cashmere throws and blankets.

Fashion brands with home lines aren’t necessarily new: Fendi, after all, has shown at previous iterations of Design Miami, and Louis Vuitton’s Objets Nomades has been around since 2012. But what is new? The fervor that surrounds them—and home decor trends as a whole. ​​ A recent report found furniture and appliance spending grew from $373 billion to $405 billion over the year. The number is supposed to reach $481.11 billion by 2025. As the pandemic causes all of us to spend more time at home, we’re all, understandably, spending more time furnishing it.

So is it any wonder that fashion houses are ready to meet demand? Louis Vuitton’s foray into outdoor furniture, for example, comes at a perfect time: that category has seen triple digit growth since 2020. In August 2021, Dolce & Gabbana told Vogue that they’ll be focusing more and more on home goods: “The circumstances we have experienced recently have led us to live the home environment even more intensely and to devote to it the attention that the daily frenzy often makes us lose,” Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana said. Personal style, it seems, is no longer just defined by what you wear. It’s what you put in your home, too.