The meeting with Formafantasma

“When you change, you have to do it out loud” says Nicolò Favaretto Rubelli about the need to “do something a little drastic” and therefore find someone who could help them tell their story and make the world understand the company’s true identity.

“When we involve customers and professionals – explains Favaretto Rubelli – they become passionate about this world (of textiles). It happened with designers like Paola Navone, Luca Nichetto and Peter Marino: they fell in love with the collection.

In this case, our idea was to focus on someone who was complementary and at the same time different from us. That is: if we are the experts in fabric, we want experts in the world outside of ours.

So, after much study, we identified Formafantasma. And it was love at first sight."

What do you mean by different?

Nicolò Favaretto Rubelli “Most people perceive Rubelli as a classic company, while Formafantasma are young, alternative, conceptual. Seen from the outside, we are quite different: it is an unexpected pairing.

If their contribution is more understandable for the Kieffer world, with Rubelli it is not as immediate and many have wondered what they have to do with us…

Working with them is a pleasure precisely because they are very open, in love with what they do, not at all ‘prima donnas’. They are bearers of real added value”.

Any unexpected aspects of this collaboration?

Nicolò Favaretto Rubelli: “Formafantasma were given the job of creative director of Rubelli with the aim of breaking out of their privileged niche, the wonderful Venetian isolation and the image of a company from the past that was too narrow for us, to lead us into the contemporary world and broaden the market.

I was focused on Rubelli and the surprise was their manifest interest in Kieffer, a brand they felt was close to. Their decision to also work on Kieffer was a ‘bonus’ they gave me.

The seriousness of their approach meant that they stayed behind the scenes for a year, to fully understand our reality. The 2024 collection will therefore be the first to bear their name".

Kieffer

Rubelli acquired the brand of the Alsatian designer Dominique Kieffer in 2001, leaving her the creative direction, which was later passed to Paola Navone.

“With the entry of Formafantasma into the creative direction – says Favaretto Rubelli – we started a second line, aware that the brand was losing its reason for being and its identity needed to be reinvented. With their contribution we started almost from a blank sheet”.

The Kieffer Manifesto by Formafantasma

One of the first things Formafantasma did was write the Kieffer Manifesto, which is the second collection of the Rubelli group.

Here are some of the principles developed by the creative directors: “Kieffer is an atelier that promotes respect, love and experimentation with fabrics. The brand evolves from the expertise of the Rubelli Group, expanding its offering and contributing to textile research, respecting the legacy of the past and equally embracing the potential of the present.

Kieffer sees fabric as the privileged interface for the tactile exploration of domestic environments… it knows how to take care of quality, durability, nuances, production processes… Kieffer is produced in the Rubelli factory and in other weaving mills near Lake Como, but it knows how to open up to the world when necessary”.

Martino Gamper's contribution

A very important aspect for the Rubelli Group was to underline how the creative direction by Formafantasma was expressed not only in the textile collections, but also in the design of the single-brand showrooms in Paris and Milan, in the coordinated image and in the involvement of new designers such as Martino Gamper.

“The collaboration with Martino Gamper – explains Favaretto Rubelli – was born because Rubelli, in addition to the Kieffer brand, has the Rubelli Casa line, which we wanted to reorganize and make more coherent.

The most iconic product up to that point was the Pila 47 armchair designed by Nava+Arosio Studio, a very particular object, all textile. I wanted to do something unexpected and identify who could create a seat that was textile but more elegant than the Pila 47 which is very casual.

From the brainstorming with Formafantasma, the profile of a person who was a designer, but also an artist and at the same time very concrete emerged. This is how the collaboration with Martino Gamper was born, a phenomenal character with whom we really enjoyed working and who was able to bring us new stimuli”.

The Figura project in fact allows us to also tell the story of the fabric and make its importance understood. Its peculiarity is that, to take shape, it requires the creative intervention of the end user”.

Figura is in fact a modular armchair that can be composed by combining the seat, backrest, armrests and sides as desired. Four elements that, entirely covered in fabric, are proposed in three different shapes each: some angular and sharp, others softer and more corporeal.