Made in Italy : Rethinking a Century of Italian Design

Abstract

Goods made or designed in Italy enjoy a disproportionately high profile, even though, in terms of global manufacturing, Italy’s output is relatively modest. Italy’s glorious design heritage and reputation for innovation mean that goods ‘Made in Italy’, and/or designed in Italy, carry added value. Since 1945, Italian design has commanded an increasing amount of attention from design journalists, critics and consumers. But is Italian design well served by the steady stream of magazine features and coffee-table books through which it is celebrated? Italian design is, to some extent, the victim of its own celebrity in that hagiographic public relations and marketing-driven treatments fail to reward its innovative, delightful and confounding output with properly critical analysis. Made in Italy offers a history of Italian design told, not through a chronological structure, but rather through a mix of broad survey chapters, which review change over time, and detailed case study chapters, addressing a period of between five and twenty years, arranged into five thematic parts. These parts draw attention to key stories and directions in new scholarship on Italian design, from an international group of scholars with established expertise in the subject, and the book moves forward the discourse surrounding Italian design from the 1920s to the present. Made in Italy functions, therefore, as both an introduction to Italian design for those new to the field, and as a survey of innovative approaches for those familiar with extant secondary material