LA PELOTA, MILAN

To visit once is delightful. But to visit every year and witness the journey of a creative house is much more intimate.

- Komal Sharma

Each spring, at the Milan Design Week, Hermès takes over La Pelota, a venue in the heart of the city, and transforms it to showcase that year's home collection—cashmere, glass, leather, porcelain, the works. It is always beautiful, goes without saying, but it is the scenography that is a triumph, year after year. Rigorous and thought through, the story is always tight, especially its origin, and then an entire world is born of it. In 2024, we saw a darkened, precisely lit black box, floored with triangles and trapezoids of pattern, as if excavated and pieced together from various civilisations of the earth. The year before, La Pelota's rectangular volume was imagined in a vocabulary of rods and concrete, light and shadow, heavy but barely there. And this year, flushed in a pristine white space, with little objects in large white volumes hovering above ground as if spilling their coloured auras underneath, it was about the presence of an object—its intangible, non-physical, soul presence, if I may say so. It was a case study in how colour and light might be used to indicate the presence of, let's say, a mouth-blown glass vase or leather or cashmere. In a sit-down interview, artistic directors Charlotte Macaux Perelman and Alexis Fabry speak to AD about the intent behind the scenography.

The scenography here at La Pelota today is very different from last year’s. When I walked in here last year, it had weight, as if of all human civilisation. This year has a lightness of being.