Aleph-Driade
A chair that I initially designed for Knoll. They found it too baroque, but when Enrico Astori saw it, he loved it. He insisted on upholstering it with the velvet used for the seats at La Scala in Milan, a velvet that has I don’t know how many hundreds of fibers per square centimeter; beautiful but more expensive than leather. For this reason, we also launched a “budget” model in black leather, and another model without arms.
The idea of the backrest structure meeting the base of the front leg is inspired by the chairs at the Lucas Carlton restaurant in Paris, a relic of pure Art Nouveau. That’s where the name comes from.
I seem to remember that Yves Saint Laurent chose it for the audience at his Haute Couture shows, but I haven’t been able to find any documentation about that.
(Out of production)