Giant Steps

Driade Celebrates 50 Years Of Playfulness With A Collection Thats Out Of This World

- Rosa Bertoli

In 1988, the design and architecture historian Renato De Fusco released a weighty tome about Italian furniture company Driade on the occasion of its 20th anniversary. Entitled The Design Game, it highlighted how the company’s output often contained a dash of whimsy. ‘Looking at Driade’s most peculiar characteristics, I’d say there is a recreational factor, a tendency to playfulness that is present throughout its design process, but mainly in its projects and communication,’ he explains in the book. ‘Among all its inspirations, the ludic one stands out.’

In 1968, its three founders, siblings Enrico and Antonia Astori and Enrico’s wife, Adelaide Acerbi Astori, created Driade based on ‘genius and insanity, design and poetry’, as the current CEO, Giuseppe Di Nuccio explains. Since then, the brand has worked with some of the most imaginative minds in design, from Enzo Mari and Nanda Vigo in the late 1960s to Borek Sipek in the 1980s and 1990s. Driade also gave a young Philippe Starck his first big break in 1984 when it produced the chairs he designed for the Café Costes in Paris. Starck’s pieces are still a celebrated part of the collection today. Many more illustrious names in design have passed through the Driade stables, from Konstantin Grcic and Naoto Fukasawa to David Chipperfield (who served as the company’s artistic director from 2014-16).