Recently joining forces with the legendary Italian mosaic maker Sicis, Lacroix made his debut at Milan’s Salone del Mobile this April with a line of furniture. “I was familiar with Sicis’ reputation, particularly for producing extremely unusual furniture steeped in good taste,” Lacroix explained.
Famous for flamboyant clothes, the furniture reflects Lacroix’s trademark style and his fondness for Theodora, wife of Byzantine Emperor Justinian, whose image is immortalised in the mosaics adorning the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, home to some of the most intricate 6th century mosaics in the world and where Sicis is based. “I’ve never stopped drawing her,” Lacroix reveals, “since she featured in my first historical fashion books dating from the 1950s and 60s, books which I still own.”
The Empress features on his Bergère Theodora, a lavish armchair upholstered in leather and brocade, embellished with velvet and black lace, that comes with an extendable Ottoman. The small but exclusive collection also includes tasselled sofas, tables, lamps and daybeds, upholstered in bold florals and stripes, arabesques and a splashes of theatrical Pop. The opulent furnishings, rich in colour, are an epoch-bending exercise in the baroque and neo-classical, the post-modern and kitsch. Much like the designer’s life. “Having the privilege of being brought up between monuments, museums and 17th century houses gave me the confidence that everything could be mixed up,” Lacroix explains.
Mosaics feature too, literally as patterns and figuratively as inspiration for the way some of the furniture appears to ‘slot’ together. Used more as stamps or signatures or in a trompe-l’oeil border, to avoid looking “too heavy-handed. When exploited conceptually, the mosaic becomes, in the designer’s words, “a modulated puzzle gone infinite, where one seat fits into another.”
He may not be designing clothes anymore but if Lacroix’s furniture’s audacity and whimsy prove anything, it’s that this designer has not lost his dramatic touch.
WHO Christian Lacroix
WHAT Lacroix’s first furniture collection, available in all Sicis showrooms
PRICES Range between 9,000 and 20,000 USD
WHY This new line of furniture highlights the French couturier’s signature affinity for jewel-like colours and extravagant materials and forms.
