A talk with Samuele Mazza
Samuele Mazza is one of the most eclectic personalities of our times: fashion designer in Florence during the 80s, first, editor of several books for Electa Mondadori, after, and interior designer, now. Thanks to his capacity to reinvent himself over the years and his untiring creativity he is today the art director of Visionnaire, a concept store that takes after his continuous “becoming”, and the creative director of its furniture lines, which express his dream approach to interiors, his emotional idea of luxury and his aberration for minimalism and austerity style.
Two years after the launch of Visionnaire and on the eve of Samuele’s collaboration with Design42Day.com, we decided to interview him to introduce his aesthetic ideas and his love for Art.
You started your career pretty early in the ’80s as a fashion designer. Have you always known you wanted to design or you were dreaming of something else before that?
Actually, it wasn’t part of my plans to become a fashion designer, but rather an art critic, that I somehow managed to continue later on. It happened by chance: somebody called to ask me to substitute a friend in a very trendy shop in Florence (Mecca Fashion) and after a week to stay permanently. I was 22 and I wasn’t sure about my skills yet, nevertheless I enjoyed creating looks for the clientele. My talent was promptly noticed and I started working for celebrities. After that experience, another shop asked me not only to sell their clothes, but also to design them. Florence in the 80s was much influenced by the British Post-Punk movement and New Wave; it was then, when I was so involved in these movements, that I understood the importance of contemporaneity in fashion and consequently in every form of expression. In the end, I never graduated from university, but I learnt what I needed on my own; perhaps intelligence and talent helped.
Fashion represents an important chapter of your life. Would you like to get back to it?
No, I wouldn’t get back to it, just because I never stopped making fashion. I just don’t make clothes anymore. What’s in vogue at the moment is interiors and it’s what I do. Nowadays, there’s tourism for design and I’m a designer of dreams and needs, not only of fashion. Settings and interests change and I follow them with my art, then things become products loosing their fashion concept and I change direction. The clothing industry is in a great crisis of identity and when I started realizing it some years ago, I left it to move to the furniture one.
You really wanted Visionnaire to happen. How did you come up with the idea?
Everybody needs a place to express themselves. When you work for your clients there’s always their influence, both because the customer might want to modify something and for budget reasons. Personally, I needed an uncompromising place, where I a could be self-financing and the only one making stylistic decisions. Moreover, I am lucky enough to have producers and supporters who give me carte blanche.
Your profession leads you to create the interiors of shops, hotels and apartments of all kinds. Did you design the interiors of your apartment too? If so, how would you describe it?
All the houses I decor look like a scenography and so does mine. I always try to give them a soul, hoping to create an atmosphere able to inject somethingintothe people who live in them. I repudiate the concept of minimalism: it’s anti-poetic and it doesn’t excite me, which is what art is for. I don’t look at the function like minimalists do, my work is focused on the research of excitement. It’s an “emotional luxury”. I create pieces that can be defined as new classical, but reconsidered in a glamorous, fresh and young way.
What’s your creative process? What does it consist in? How does it show?
The torment is ecstasy to me this is My creative process. There are things that I would like to do and that I dream of and then there’s the market, there is what I want and what people expect. I work with a visionary logic, I imagine what could fill an empty room. My visions change depending on what surrounds me. I get very influenced by contemporaneity and what happens around me – I can’t help but keeping in mind the context I live in. I would like to put at disposal this capacity I have, I want to give something important to Milan, for this city gave me a lot.
What would you like to do now and what are your projects for the future?
I feel like a cruise: I stop where there’s something interesting. I don’t have a specific project, but to leave a mark that I think I have already started leaving. I’m almost 50, so I start thinking about these things. Pleasure, for me, is in doing things that can survive far beyond me, projects that may also have an institutional value. For example, now I’m doing an opera hall in Kazakhstan, but of course there are also other things to do that I like less. In the past I also worked in the editorial field, curating over 30 books for Electa Mondadori. I don’t think it’s necessary to have a precise project, but it’s important to live at the best, live well. In general, though, I prefer to get inspiration from things that are more than average, I prefer Radical Rich. I don’t like mediocrity, I like luxury and I want to live it. Not needing anything allows you to help the others, if luxury is being able to make yourself available. I have what I need, not more.
