Raffaella Mangiarotti

Raffaella Mangiarotti (1965–) is an Italian designer. The daughter of a prominent computer engineer who worked as an executive at Necchi and Olivetti, she grew up surrounded by iconic design objects created by masters such as Ettore Sottsass and Marco Zanuso. It was in Zanuso’s studio that she began her professional path, after graduating from the Politecnico di Milano in 1991, before founding the studio Deepdesign in 1999 together with Francesco Trabucco. The two collaborated for several years, working in design and art direction across a wide range of mass-consumption sectors, from food packaging to consumer electronics. One of the studio’s creations, the Dandelion lamp designed in 2003 for the brand Tecnodelta, is now part of the permanent collection of the MoMA in New York. Her style remained rooted in sober and sustainable functionality even after she parted ways with Trabucco in 2010 and focused primarily on furniture design. Among her first major roles in this field was the art direction of the brand Serralunga, a position she held from 2010 to 2015. She has devoted particular attention to office design, aiming to modernize the traditional forms of twentieth-century gray office spaces through the use of color and an emphasis on comfort. In this area, her work as art director for the brands Manerba (from 2014 to 2018) and IOC (since 2018) has been especially significant. Her design has also consistently shown strong Scandinavian influences, further developed through her collaboration with Finnish designer Ilkka Suppanen, with whom she created products for brands such as Woodnotes and B-Line. A prolific and highly successful designer, over the years she has also created products for leading Italian design brands including De Padova, Pianca, Alf DaFrè, Lapalma, Opinion Ciatti, and many others.