Greetings from the road, the tracks to be specific, as I’m writing from the train heading from Rome to Milan, where I’m attending the Salone del Mobile fair for the first time in at least 20 years. I used to cover it for Wallpaper, back in its very early days under Tyler Brulé, and it was there that I met the architect Oskar Kaufmann who did our house in upstate NY, and the renovation of our Maison Médoc house in France (which we are softly putting on the market so let me know if you’re seriously interested and we can have an offline chat about that). Oskar, who back then was really the prefab master, had built out a prefab townhouse that was a Fendi/Wallpaper collab, and I was there to photograph it. We had a lot of downtime waiting for it to get put together/styled out, and we became fast friends over copious amounts of panini, Italian beer, and Marlboros which he was chain-smoking. I’m excited to see what is happening at Salone this year, but the real reason I’m heading there is I’m doing a launch party for these new Friulane slippers that I’m doing with Scarosso. A couple of years ago, Yolanda did a collab with them, and I just fit into their biggest size. But after falling in love with them—for me they function like a dressed up espadrille, or a summer slipper—I convinced them they should make these for men in some of my favorite color ways. I’ll be posting photos of them on social after tonight’s big reveal, and the link to order them.
© 2024 Matt Hranek
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