1. See, for example, Fossati, P., Il design in Italia, Einaudi, Turin, 1972; Ambasz, E. (ed.), Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, Museum of modern Art, New York, 1972; Gregotti, V., ‘Per una storia del design italiano’, Ottagono, nos. 32, 33, 34, Milan, 1974–5, pp. 27–47, 21–37, 20–35, respectively; Taborelli, G. and Fagone, V. (eds), Disegno Italiano, Silvana, Milan, 1979; Grassi, V. and Pansera, A., Atlante del design italiano 1940–1980, Electa, Milan, 1982; Gregotti, V., Il disegno del prodotto industrial: Italia 1860–1980, Electa, Milan, 1982; and Branzi, A., The Hot House: Italian new wave design, Thames & Hudson, London, 1984.Google Scholar

2. In his Il design in Italia 1945–1972, for example, Paolo Fossati used three chapter headings— ‘Il dopoguerra’, ‘Gli anni del design italiano’ and ‘L'organizzazione e la crisi’—which exactly mirrored these three historical moments. For Fossati, as for others, the highest achievement of Italy's designers came at the moment of the country's economic boom—i.e. in the early 1960s, when foreign trade was at its strongest and home consumption at a peak.Google Scholar

3. These maxims had emerged in the first decades of the century, the first from the writings of the American architect, Louis Sullivan, and the latter from writings emanating from the British Arts and crafts movement of the second half of the nineteenth century.Google Scholar

4. Examples of these were the Turinese designer. Carlo Mollino's furniture items (made of solid wood and moulded plywood), Nizzoli's, Marcello ‘Lexicon 80’ typewriter for Olivetti (1948); Piaggio's, ‘Vespa’ motor-scooter, designed by Corradino d'Ascanio (1947) and Gio Ponti's coffee-machine for La Pavoni (1947). The curved body-shells of the last three objects were a result of the metal-pressing techniques used in their fabrication. They resembled American streamlined objects but were less ornate and more sculptural than their transatlantic counterparts.Google Scholar

5. Pressed metal, moulded plastics and synthetic foam used for upholstery numbered among the new materials that were linked with the new organic aesthetic visible in many new Italian goods in these years. Kartell, among other companies, made a name for itself as a producer of plastic items, embued with a modern aesthetic, with the help of the designer Gino Columbini. Marco Zanuso created a number of seating objects filled with the new synthetic foam for Arflex, a subsidiary of the Pirelli company.Google Scholar

6. Most notable in this respect were Marco Zanuso's plastic child's chair for Kartell, available in apple green, red, white or black; Vico Magistretti's ‘Selene’ plastic armchair for Artemide, developed in the early 1960s and available in the same colour range and items designed by Joe Colombo for Kartell in the same material in that decade. Smaller domestic objects—knife sharpeners, ashtrays, etc.—also came in yellow and red, giving the modern Italian domestic interior a shiny, bright appearance which was a complete contrast to the familiar browns of the peasant interior of yesteryear. This dramatic shift was one of the ways in which post-war Italy made its bid for modernity a highly visible one.Google Scholar

7. Branzi, , The Hot House, p. 45.Google Scholar

8. The concept is best elucidated in Davidoff, L. and Hall, C., Family Fortunes: Men and women of the English middle-class 1780–1850, Routledge, London, 1987. It focuses on the way in which industrialization drove a physical wedge between the worlds of men and women such that men inhabited the world of work (factories, offices, etc.) whereas women remained in the home, charged with a role as aesthetic and moral keepers of that domain. Their responsibilities for the maintenance of social status and the creation of a level of comfort which would help make the home a ‘haven’ away from the world of commerce determined the way in which they organized the household and created its appearance. From the public/private separation flowed a number of oppositions which linked the ideas of (among others) intuition, decoration, hand-making, amateurism and consumption with the ‘feminine’ sphere and rationality, simplicity, mechanized production and professionalism with the public, ‘masculine’ sphere. While these distinctions are inevitably crude and stereotypical in nature the latter became nonetheless the base-line for the architectural and design theory known as modernism, as articulated first by reformers such as John Ruskin and William Morris in England and later by Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier in Europe, while the former became marginalized from the centre of the discussion relating to the concept of ‘modern design’ as it evolved through the early and middle years of the twentieth century.Google Scholar

9. See Huyssen, A., After the Great Divide: Modernism, mass culture and postmodernism, Macmillan, London, 1986.Google Scholar

10. Doordan, D., ‘Rebuilding the House of Man’, in Celant, G., The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1995, pp. 586–95.Google Scholar

11. Rationalism made an appearance in Italy in the late 1920s through the work of a group of seven architects, among them Guiseppe Terragni, Sebastiano Larco, Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini, who called themselves ‘Gruppo Sette’ and who launched themselves through the publication of a series of manifestoes published in Rassegna from December 1926. Their strongest influence was the French architect, le Corbusier, and they saw themselves operating in an international, rather than in an exclusively Italian, context.Google Scholar

12. Rogers, a member of the architectural group BBPR, was the powerful editor of Domus magazine between 1946 and 1948—the years of the coalition government—and he worked hard at reinstating the relevance of the functionalist programme of architectural modernism in the needy years of the early reconstruction. With the re-emergence of Gio Ponti as editor in 1948 this programme was sidelined to a significant extent as the ideal of the ‘good life’ came to replace the more egalitarian programme put forward by Rogers. All the young designers who rose to prominence in the post-war years—Vico Magistretti, Ettore Sottsass, Marco Zanuso and others—had some experience of this short-lived moment of neo-modernism. Its sense of democratic idealism undoubtedly influenced them all significantly.Google Scholar

13. This was visible in the programme that underpinned the curriculum at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, headed by Max Bill from 1951 onwards, which claimed to be continuing the unfinished project of the Bauhaus, closed by the Nazis in 1933.Google Scholar

14. Produced by sculptors such as Lucio Fontana and others modern ceramic objects, in particular, adopted the expressive, neo-primitive modern aesthetic adopted by Pablo Picasso in his ceramic forms of these years. For further information see Sparke, P., ‘The Straw Donkey: Tourist kitsch or proto-design? Craft and design in Italy 1945–1960’, Journal of Design History, 11, 1, 1998, pp. 59–69.Google Scholar

15. The United States helped Italy significantly in these years. See Sparke, P., ‘Italian Industrial Aesthetics and the Influence of American Industrial Design’, in Celant, , The Italian Metamorphosis.Google Scholar

16. For the details of the institutional support which lay behind the creation of this exhibition, see Teague, W., ‘Forward’, in Italy at Work: The renaissance in design today, Compagnia Nazionale Artigiana, Rome, 1950, pp. i–xii.Google Scholar

17. These included toys made from straw, decorative plaques made of pietra dura, hand-embroidered skirts and decorative church metalwork.Google Scholar

18. This category included two items of office equipment designed by Marcello Nizzoli for Olivetti, an espresso home coffee machine, made by the Robbiati company, and a ‘Lambretta’ motor-scooter manufactured by Innocenti. All four objects had curved, pressed-metal body-shells.Google Scholar

19. The architects Eugenia Reggio and Emma Calderini produced a display of what they called ‘folkloric’ pieces made of straw. It was described as a field of production which was ‘pericoloso al gusto’ (‘a danger to taste’, Domus July–August 1951, p. 36).Google Scholar

20. Since the 1920s Ponti had worked with ceramic manufacturers—Richard-Ginori in the first instance—and he was strongly committed to the decorative arts. His pieces designed in the 1950s, the surfaces of which were decorated by Piero Fornasetti, were all ‘one-off’ pieces. In the 1940s and 1950s he wrote extensively about the need for industry and designers to recognize the importance of craft while his own oeuvre spanned ceramics, metalwork industrial products and architecture.Google Scholar

21. For further details of this early stage in Sottsass' career see Sparke, P., Ettore Sottsass Jnr, Design Council, London, 1982.Google Scholar

22. Sottsass was the inspiration behind the Milan-based Memphis group which showed its designs to the world for the first time in 1981. For their furniture pieces the members of the group used plastic laminates covered with surface patterns which derived from the language of abstract signs that Sottsass had first worked on with ceramic objects in the 1950s.Google Scholar

23. The Memphis project was seen as a direct attack on not only Italian but also international design modernism when it exhibited its work in 1981 in Milan.Google Scholar

24. Examples included a wooden and canvas chair, designed by Vico Magistretti, based on a deck-chair, a metal-framed bookcase, also by Magistretti, which could be fitted anywhere as it was fixed into position by the extensions of the sides of the frame being forced against the floor and the ceiling, and a small plywood and metal rod chair by Ettore Sottsass.Google Scholar

25. Rogers, E., ‘Editorial’, Domus, January 1946, pp. 1–4, p. 3 Google Scholar

26. Ginsborg, P., ‘Family, culture and politics in contemporary Italy’, in Baranski, Z.G. and Lumley, R. (eds), Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy, Macmillan, London, 1990, pp. 21–49, p. 22 Google Scholar

27. This was a landmark exhibition which served to show the international design community what had been going on in Italy over the previous decade. It divided its exhibits into three main groupings— ‘objects selected for their formal and technical means; objects selected for their sociocultural implications; and objects selected for their implications of more flexible patterns of use and arrangement’—the first of which corresponded to what might be called ‘neo-modernism’. The other two groupings represented radical work of the last few years—both realized and idealized—which had developed out of the crises of the mid-1960s and was working in direct reaction to the modernist canon.Google Scholar

28. This idea has been widely discussed by feminist historians from the early 1980s onwards who have sought to reposition women in discussions relating to modernity. A recent text to focus on this issue is Tag Gronberg's, Designs on Modernity: Exhibiting the city in 1920s Paris, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1998 which looks at the Paris 1925 Exhibition of Decorative Arts as a material cultural phenomenon which reflected the idea of Paris as a site for the feminized activity of consumption.Google Scholar

29. For more detail relating to this popular modern style see Hillier, B., Art Deco, Studio Vista, London, 1968.Google Scholar

30. For more detailing about streamlining see Grief, M., Depression Modern: The Thirties style in America, Universe Books, New York, 1975.Google Scholar

31. Sottsass, E., Untitled, undated, unpublished lecture in author's personal archive, Milan, p. 23.Google Scholar

32. Ibid.Google Scholar

33. Ibid, p. 24.Google Scholar

34. By the mid-1960s it had begun to be apparent that architectural and design modernism had outlived their sell-by date. The American architect, Robert Venturi's, publication Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1966, laid down the tenets for a new approach which was much more open-ended. This coincided, in Italy, with the ‘Anti-design’ movement of the second half of the 1960s, which set out to challenge neo-modernism.Google Scholar

35. In particular Italian workers were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with their conditions and students adopted the strategies of left-wing politics in support of them.Google Scholar

36. These were two groups of furniture items, both of them covered with plastic laminate. The first emulated the tactics of the American Pop artists, using icons from mass culture to inspire art works. Sottsass' desks and shelves looked more like traffic lights and bank safes rather than traditional furniture objets. The second group, consisting of a set of wardrobes, were covered by plastic laminate decorated with the striking black and white and coloured stripes of Pop Art and Pop fashion items of the period. By allying himself with Pop culture Sottsass was attempting to disassociate himself from high culture and, by extension, from the hegemonic rule of modernism. Ironically, of course, his pieces were destined for the art gallery rather than the furniture showroom and so remained within the realm of high culture.Google Scholar

37. While a handful of large Italian manufacturers—Pirelli, Olivetti and Fiat among them—adopted Fordist manufacturing techniques in the post-war period, there were still large numbers of small and medium-sized manufacturing units in Italy which remained more flexible in their manufacturing strategies. For more information on flexible manufacture in Italy, see Brusco, S., ‘The Emilian model: productive decentralization and social integration’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 6, 2, 1982, pp. 167–84 and Buxton, J., ‘A nation of small firms’, Design, October 1983, p. 21.Google Scholar