Milan, April 2026—Heritage Italian couture brand TIVIOLI and French-American gallery and interior design firm Demisch Danant present INTERPLAY, a collaborative exhibition exploring the intersection of couture materials and historic design during the 2026 Salone del Mobile in Milan. Clemente Tivioli, entrepreneur and Creative Director for TIVIOLI, invites Demisch Danant’s cofounder Suzanne Demisch with senior interior designer Lily Kelly, to co-curate the presentation. The installation will be displayed from April 21st to 26th at the TIVIOLI historical boutique, Via Santo Spirito 24, originally designed in 1996 by architect Gae Aulenti, located in the heart of the Quadrilatero della Moda.
“I have long admired Demisch Danant’s curatorial taste and design sensibility. This project began from a shared vision—bringing Tivioli’s language of couture materials into dialogue with Demisch Danant’s culture of historic design and interior composition,” said Tivioli.
“At Demisch Danant we are interested in how design objects exist within a larger visual and architectural context,” said Demisch. “This exhibition offered an opportunity to explore how couture textiles and historic furniture might interact within carefully composed environments, revealing unexpected affinities between fashion and interiors.”
Structured as four distinct vignettes, the installation presents a series of intimate compositions, where historic furniture, lighting, objects, garments, textiles and art, form unified environments. Rather than recreating a domestic interior, each vignette functions as a staged composition in which fashion and furniture are treated as parallel forms of object-making.
“I always treated my garments as wearable objects. In this exhibition we allowed them to enter the world of furniture, where materials, surfaces and silhouettes can speak to each other,” added Tivioli.
Furniture and objects from Demisch Danant’s inventory, specialist galleries such as Giustini Stagetti and Galerie Deroyan, as well as auction houses, are placed in dialogue with Tivioli’s archive of couture materials. Several historic pieces are reinterpreted through new upholstery using TIVIOLI materials—including suede, leather, pony hair, and rare vintage fabrics sourced from the brand’s textile archive. Visitors will experience works by A.R.P., René-Jean Caillette, Albert Féraud, Guido Gambone, Michel Guino, Max Ingrand, Francis Jourdain, Joseph-André Motte, Michel Mortier, Pierre Paulin, Maria Pergay, Philippon & Lecoq, Gio Ponti, Carlo Scarpa, Paolo Venini, and more.
Inspired by traditions of Italian exhibition design, particularly mid-century museum installations such as the 1953 exhibition design by Carlo Scarpa and Roberto Calandra, as well as Scarpa’s museum interventions (Museo di Castelvecchio; Palazzo Abatellis), INTERPLAY, through the four vignettes, emphasizes material, light and spatial composition, as applied to domestic-scale scenes.
Visitors encounter a range of design languages, from Art Deco and Art Nouveau, to postwar French modernism, presented through layered compositions of furniture, screens and draped textiles. Upholstered seating, sculptural lighting, and design objects are paired with garments treated as sculptural forms. Freestanding partitions, drapery, and framed sightlines create a sequence of environments within the larger white-box space.
