Finding the Sweet Spot Between Fashion, Design and Food
MILAN — Pasticceria Cova, the historic Milan-based coffee and pastry house controlled by LVMH Mo?t Hennessy Louis Vuitton that was founded in 1817, has seen fashion collections from top brands like Berluti grace its halls and wallpaper from Jannelli e Volpi drape its walls. Indeed, for its chief executive officer and shareholder Paola Faccioli, the realms of fashion, design and food are closer than ever.
“We love to dress our products. We work with a lot of brands. We have fun…inventing a mignon or a box and it’s fun because we look to uphold our brand [heritage] by fusing it with other brands,” Faccioli told WWD Milan bureau chief Luisa Zargani during a panel discussion that was dedicated to the topic of the importance of design in food, beverage and hospitality.
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At the Fashion Loves Food gala held at Milan’s Palazzo Parigi on Nov. 5, Faccioli was joined by fellow speakers, design expert Alberto Alessi, president of Alessi, and famed pastry chef Fabrizio Fiorani.
Fiorani said his work experience, which includes stints at historic hotels like Il Pellicano in Porto Ercole, Italy and the Bulgari Hotel chain, taught him how to convey the essence of a hotel brand and eventually even fashion brands.
“We are realizing in this period that none of us actually eat out of hunger. Think about a dessert,” Fiorani told the crowd, explaining that design is the key factor in imbuing the haute culinary with that of fashion. “We need to touch and evoke the soul, heart and fantasy and we try…with design. To try and make this brand be eaten…with a mountain of white chocolate, 4 meters high for the company Moncler, where we distribute 300 hammers and Pharrell [Williams] eats a piece of chocolate like this, I say to myself — ‘Heck, we did something good,'” he enthused before a crowd of fashion, design and food hospitality world VIPs.
Maintaining quality and historic values is key for staying on the crest of an ongoing wave, in which fashion, design and the culinary world continue to cross-pollinate and evolve together. Nobody understands the synergies that take place when these worlds mingle quite like Faccioli, who in 2013 saw LVMH take a majority stake in her family’s storied firm Pasticceria Confetteria Cova Srl, owner of the Cova brand and of the Cova Montenapoleone Srl firm that continues to manage what arguably remains Milan’s most fashionable and iconic coffee house, located on Via Montenapoleone.
After the transaction, the Faccioli family remained shareholders and continue to manage Cova to “guarantee the continuity and success” that company has built since its inception in 1817. The company’s expansion strategy was set in motion in 1993 with the launch of the first café in Hong Kong, followed by units in Shanghai and later Monte Carlo and Dubai. The firm now has 37 stores worldwide.
“Cova for me is family. It’s not always easy to transmit this sense of familiarity in Shanghai and Hong Kong and Kuwait City. It’s a tradition that is always looking forward,” she said, underlining the importance of her ongoing task to stay on top of trends throughout all creative industries.
Alberto Alessi, the grandson of Alessi founder Giovanni Alessi, grew up around designers. His closest mentors were Alessandro Mendini and Aldo Rossi, Achille Castiglioni, as well as Ettore Sottsass, under whom he worked for about 30 years. A pioneer of collaborations, he has been a main catalyst of the brand’s international expansion, officially joinig the company in 1970, a time when Alessi shed its industrial past and evolved into a creative design hub that echoed worldwide.
In the ’80s, Alessi invited young architects and designers to participate in a competition involving the creation of a new tea and coffee set, marking a major pivot for the company. In recent years, he famously sought out late fashion designer Virgil Abloh for a cutlery set and most recently Arthur Arbesser to interpret a corkscrew designed by Mendini in 1994. Some collaborations for the 103-year-old company, however, didn’t work, like his attempt to join the forces of world class chefs with designers in the late ’70s. “It wasn’t received very well. They didn’t understand anything about design and the designers didn’t understand anything about cooking,” he joked, to a round of laughter.
Alessi’s president recognized that much of the company’s success has been driven by his motto that functional objects like toasters and spoons have the potential to be intrinsically poetic.
“We have to balance the best expression of international design and on the other hand, people’s dreams more than needs…the public’s imagination versus what they need.”
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