Jasper attended Milan’s annual furniture trade fair – the Salone del Mobile – for the first time in September 1979. He has been every year since. Until the 1990s, the Fair took place in September, at a venue near the centre of Milan. (Since then, it has taken place in April.) Jasper took these photographs of Milan in the early 1980s.
I attended my first Milan Salone del Mobile in September 1979. I had seen design magazine reports that showed interesting designs by Italian designers with exotic names: Vico Magistretti, Achille Castiglione, Enzo Mari, Ettore Sottsass, Mario Bellini, Angelo Mangiarotti, and these reports spoke of the Salone. I soon understood this was the forum for the profession I was aiming to join. In those days I travelled mostly by train or by Dan-Air – the Easy Jet of its day, though it was far from easy. Money was also complicated. It was safest to have American Express travellers’ cheques which could be exchanged for foreign cash at banks.
I spent my first day in Milan looking for a hotel. I walked around checking rooms, until I came upon Hotel Nuovo, with its subtitle ‘Aperto tutto il Notte’. It’s still there in Piazza Beccaria opposite the police headquarters and well placed between the Duomo and Piazza San Babila. Hotel Nuovo was affordable and I was shown a good room in the old building on the piano nobile with windows opening on to a small balcony. On most evenings I pulled a table and chair out there and dined on pizza and beer, before heading out to the openings. I had very few contacts but to arrange to meet anyone you needed to use a telephone and be lucky enough to catch them ‘at home’.
Hotel Nuovo’s new wing turned out to be a rather busy bordello with the off-duty girls sitting it out on a cluster of armchairs near the coin-operated phone. When I came back late each night I’d find the hotel concierge on the front desk drinking grappa with a policeman, while the bordello’s ‘customers’ passed in and out leaving and collecting their documents. Italian life was new and colourful for a nineteen-year-old design student. I had no idea then that I’d be making the same trip to Milan for the next 40-plus years, but I knew that I loved Milan and its way of life.
The Salone was relatively small in those days. There was only one small hall for modern ‘designed’ furniture and to get to it from the front entrance you would take a short cut through a hall of gilded wonders destined for the Arab market, with side tables consisting of miniature black slaves holding trays on their heads and other atrocities. There were very few international manufacturers showing, even fewer foreign designers and hardly any press at all. The collective mood at the end of the 1970s seemed to be one of impasse, the quest for expression of logical thinking having reached the end of its road. It was not a fertile period. Still, the Salone represented the cutting edge of design, as it still does.