Gabriella Crespi

Gabriella Crespi (1922-2017) is remembered mainly as the “jet-set designer”: her pieces were present in the homes of some of the most prominent figures of the time, from Grace Kelly to the Shah of Persia Reza Pahlavi, from Audrey Hepburn to Gunther Sachs. Her creative path followed very peculiar lines, far from any academicism and from the relationship with industry. Having graduated in architecture from the Polytechnic of Milan, she had a brief and unfortunate marriage to Giuseppe Maria Crespi, scion of one of the richest families in Italy. Her activity as a designer began almost as a game, with objects and lamps made by hand and sold to friends in high society, but it gained strong momentum already in the 1960s with a series of collaborations with the fashion house Dior which would sell several products designed by her (objects, table services but also complete furniture). In 1964, having separated from her husband, she opened her first shop in Rome in the Renaissance Palazzo Cenci, followed in 1973 by a store on Via Montenapoleone in Milan. Her success peaked in these years thanks to creations such as the “Plurimi” series (1970-82), made up of sculpture-furniture. Her creations were handcrafted, the result of a multifaceted inspiration that favored warm and intense materials such as metal (especially bronze and brass) and bamboo, expressed in charmingly deco forms. In 1987, she decided to make a radical life choice and retire to India, on the slopes of the Himalayas, to follow the teachings of the spiritual guru Sri Munaraji. In more recent years, she has been the subject of intense critical rediscovery, culminating in an exhibition at the Milanese Dimore Gallery curated in collaboration with her daughter Elisabetta Crespi, a careful custodian of the historical memory of her mother’s works. Some of his collections were later re-proposed by the Danish brand Gubi.