The synergy in experimentation
When two visions of creativity enter into dialogue, shared affinities, sensibilities, and approaches begin to unfold. From this exchange emerges the first collaboration between Alessi and C.P. Company. In an intimate conversation, Carlo Gasparini (Design Director of Alessi) and Lorenzo Osti (President of C.P. Company) reflect on the legacies and shared values of the two Italian brands. The discussion is moderated by Francesca Appiani, curator at Museo Alessi.
FRANCESCA APPIANI: Let’s start at the beginning: when and how were the two companies founded?
CARLO GASPARINI: Alessi was founded in 1921 in Omegna, on Lake Orta. The area was not economically prosperous, but the climate was optimistic in the post-war period. At the time, it was a small artisan workshop producing tableware in “soft metals” such as nickel silver and brass. We are now in the fourth generation. In the 1950s, with the second generation, came the transition to industry, marked by the use of steel—shiny and reflective like silver, but more affordable. This shift required new facilities and a significant increase in scale, allowing us to produce larger quantities and distribute beyond Italy.Products were designed in-house by the Alessi Technical Office at the time. The idea of involving external designers emerged with the third generation, when Alberto Alessi joined the company in 1970. It was a difficult but decisive shift, not without friction, as my grandfather saw the involvement of external designers as a risky move. It marked the end of what we might call a self-referential approach to design.Alberto opened the company to different creative contributions, establishing a practice of cultural mediation that continues to this day. That was when we became a “design factory.”
LORENZO OSTI: How did you maintain such a recognisable identity while working with creatives who were so different from one another?
CARLO GASPARINI: That was thanks to Alberto Alessi and his consistently open approach to creativity, albeit grounded in very clear intentions. He always selected designers and products which, despite their diversity, expressed the same exploratory attitude. I like to speak of the “expression of the spirit of the age,” which, for me, is a multifaceted concept. The idealist view suggests that every era has a single spirit, whereas in reality several coexist. Designers, with all their different languages, do not cancel each other out; rather, they add up, enriching the complexity through which we read the present.
LORENZO OSTI: Our story begins in 1960s Bologna, a stimulating, avant-garde city where you felt you could do anything, even without formal training.In 1967, my father took an evening course in graphic design and opened a small communications agency. He entered the clothing world almost by chance and, in 1971, founded Chester Perry, inspired by comic books and pop art—immediate languages that he translated into the graphics on his first T-shirts. He was among the first to apply screen-printing and other print techniques to clothing. Without any formal training, it came naturally to him to experiment with fabric, using unconventional techniques and creating a cross-disciplinary mix of languages. I believe that is exactly why people responded so positively to his products: he made “strange” things and saw things differently. He created effects that intrigued people, because it was not immediately clear what was real and what was printed.
After a legal dispute over the name’s similarity to other brands, it became C.P. Company and established an in-house fabric experimentation lab. This was where my father introduced an important idea: buying a single undyed base, making the garments, and dyeing them once finished. Garment dyeing enabled a wide range of variations and experiments, even in small runs, making the project industrially sustainable. Over the years, however, a series of events led him to leave C.P. Company. He embarked on new entrepreneurial ventures but never managed to recreate the artisanal-industrial platform he had built within his company. When he died in 2005, our family felt a responsibility to preserve his work, and so the archive was born, bringing together garments and materials from across his career. It was through the archive that I began to reconnect with the brand.In 2015, when C.P. Company was put up for sale, I proposed the acquisition to a Chinese entrepreneur. That’s how I joined the company. In ten years, turnover went from 7 million to 120 million. The formula was solid, and the timing was right: in our sector, half the momentum comes from riding the wave.
FRANCESCA APPIANI: Two different stories, yet with many similarities, such as a strong product culture and a kind of “omnivorous” experimentation that feeds into the archive. Alessi also has a very rich archive. What value does this heritage hold for your companies?
LORENZO OSTI: For my father, it was indispensable. Since he had no “learned” technical tools—he didn’t know how to make a pattern, for example—his process was transformative: he started from existing garments and altered them. He immediately began visiting flea markets in search of samples: a practical necessity that became a structural element of our working process. He used to say, “Every collection begins with a walk through the archive.” And that is exactly how we continue to use it today, constantly adding to it.
CARLO GASPARINI: That makes me think of my grandmother, who made her wedding dress from a parachute. As for our archive, it grew out of Alberto Alessi’s need for order. Ceaseless experimentation meant the company was filling up with drawings and prototypes born of research. Creating order helps you understand what has been done, mistakes included. Research is not really research if you already know where you are going: you have to take risks—it is part of the enterprise. Failure is essential to understanding. As an old wise man used to say, there are two ways to understand things: either you’re enlightened, or you make mistakes.
LORENZO OSTI: You make mistakes, and then you learn.
FRANCESCA APPIANI: That brings us to the value of error: how important is it?
CARLO GASPARINI: Error is fundamental. The transformation brought about by Alberto Alessi began with an act of “entrepreneurial disobedience”: inviting artists to create Alessi d’après, a collection of art multiples made using the same machines employed to produce trays and baskets. Among them was Salvador Dalí, to whom Alessi had sent a steel sheet—the foundation of our production. Alberto and his uncle Ettore, then head of the Technical Office, went to visit him at his house in Port Lligat to see Object inutile, the piece he had created by sinuously bending the sheet and adding a clothes peg with a comb to which salmon-fishing hooks had been welded. Ettore said he immediately understood it was provocative, but Alberto was thrilled and ordered 50,000 hooks from Norway to produce the multiple. The first pieces that came out were a commercial flop, and my grandfather, worried about the possible consequences of the operation, halted the project. Mistaken for scrap metal to be recycled, Dalí’s original prototype ended up being crushed during a workshop clear-out, while legend has it that the hooks Alberto ordered are still scattered somewhere around the factory. In reality, that “mistake” marked the beginning of artistic thinking within our production: a seminal moment that set in motion our subsequent path of experimentation with the creative world.
LORENZO OSTI: A step too far, perhaps. Maybe the company wasn’t ready to produce art, and design became the middle ground. The same often happened to my father: projects that were too visionary, but which, over time, were gradually tempered until they met the public halfway.
CARLO GASPARINI: Archive and error are closely linked. Life is a school that gives you the exam first and explains the lesson afterwards. At Alessi, an almost geological mountain of attempts accumulated, allowing us to understand the realms of technique and aesthetics.
LORENZO OSTI: We are perfectly aligned in that respect. My father used to say that his finest inventions were born of error, but since he had to produce six collections a year, he couldn’t simply wait for mistakes to reveal themselves—he had to systematise them. He set up a very expensive industrial process to increase the chances of finding mistakes. In textiles, our core field, fabrics were dyed in every possible way, even in ways they knew were wrong. For example, cotton won’t take colour in a nylon dye bath, but they did it anyway.
This generated an extraordinary number of samples. We still have more than 100 baskets—incidentally, the only metal object designed by my father—filled with colour tests that testify to this experimentation. Among all those tests, a fabric would occasionally react in an unexpected way—and innovation would begin from there. The archive preserves the memory of this titanic undertaking: every ‘badly dyed’ fabric sample is labelled with all the information needed to reproduce it. One part of the archive is therefore an archive of mistakes.
CARLO GASPARINI: I completely relate to this approach, where it’s not technology limiting expressiveness, but poetry pushing technical innovation.
FRANCESCA APPIANI: There seems to be a common thread running through all these stories: design as a cultural act.
CARLO GASPARINI: It is a total way of thinking. Today, within the economic system on which our activities are built, aesthetics is often reduced to a mere commercial lever, whereas for us it is also a way of taking care of society. Objects, at their best, help us transcend everyday physicality and appreciate the invisible. What manifests through beauty is non-physical: the emotion it generates puts you in touch with a higher frequency, and that is why it is beneficial. But the magic disappears when reduced to economic performance. The stories we are telling are full of this power—this capacity to put us in touch with depths more typical of the artistic world. I would add one more thing: I also believe that the objects we live with and the spaces we inhabit are material projections of what is inside us. I learned this from my mother, who was a psychoanalyst, but also from my training as an architect. Designing—like choosing an object or a garment to wear—gives shape to our dreams, fears, and ambitions. We recognise ourselves in objects because we see ourselves reflected in them.
LORENZO OSTI: You’ve unlocked a thought for me. It has always been said that my father’s talent was his ability to understand the contemporary world and translate it into his work, as though he were simply a conduit. Your interpretation is far more interesting: you absorb the contemporary, but what you put into the object is entirely yourself.
CARLO GASPARINI: It’s like the role of the observer in quantum physics: reality is determined by the person watching. Everything is energy: what we call matter is a frequency, a vibration of atoms that gives us the perception of cold or warmth, hardness or softness. Think of the tactile wonder of your fabrics: it is not just fibre; it is an energetic frequency that we perceive. The energy invested in creating something determines the nature of the object. This brings me to another element that I think our practices share: the role of cultural mediators. Companies like ours can be described as cultural agents—they bring about change to introduce something positive into people’s lives. The “strange” things your father created stirred something: an emotion produced in the physical dimension that allows a degree of transcendence. That is essential; it is real nourishment.
LORENZO OSTI: That happens when you have nothing to say.
CARLO GASPARINI: Or when you have someone behind you so intent on profit that the economic aspect takes precedence over the risk involved in research. Aesthetic research, in our case.
LORENZO OSTI: Exactly. The aim is to create something; success comes afterwards, and that is how society recognises the quality of your work. Today, by contrast, things are designed around a table with the sole aim of economic success, but the result is soulless and short-lived. FRANCESCA APPIANI: Listening to you both, I also sense the themes of tradition and innovation beneath the surface.
CARLO GASPARINI: The Latin root of ‘tradition’ is tradere, meaning ‘to hand over, to transmit’, and it is the same root as the word ‘betray’, but in that case it’s to hand over to the enemy. The paradox is simple: if we were truly bound to tradition, we would remain immobile. The only way to create a tradition is to betray the existing one. It is a chain of events, a dynamic concept.
LORENZO OSTI: Many people see tradition and innovation as opposites. But if you understand tradition as both ‘to transmit’ and ‘to betray’, the circle closes. Tradition is not static; it remains open. This is the logic of the archive: we start from the existing to create something that does not yet exist.
FRANCESCA APPIANI: One final question: how did your collaboration come about?
LORENZO OSTI: I was sceptical at first, the world of steel products felt too polished and refined. But after visiting you, I realised that what lay behind was actually very similar to us. The final result is perfect: pure forms and a material that retains fingerprints when touched. These objects will change and age alongside the people who use them: one of my father’s design principles translated into metal.
CARLO GASPARINI: We chose Richard Sapper’s coffee maker and selected Enzo Mari’s tray and Jean Nouvel’s cups from the archive because they share the same aesthetic frequency as C.P. Company: authentic, technical forms rooted in our culture of metalworking. Nouvel’s cups also have a double wall, which recalls the thermal insulation of your garments. For the surface treatment, we wanted the DNA of C.P. Company. We conducted a lot of tests, experimenting with different technologies before arriving at a surface that feels alive, not perfect, but as you say, authentic.