Half a century ago, Italian designers attempted social revolution through design.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the work emerging from Italian designers looked like visions of an acid trip: sofas shaped like voluptuous crimson lips, tactile carpets that mimic dry riverbeds, coat stands that look like a nude woman had a (painful) run-in with a cactus, lounge chairs that resemble three-foot-tall blades of grass. But these designers weren’t after some Alice in Wonderland whimsy; they were anti-establishment sentinels, protesting consumerism, fascism, and inequality.