Celebrating Milan Design Week with Walter & Wassily
Dance and design came together in the most engaging eyewear party of the year: Celebrating our new special edition Walter & Wassily at Isola Design Districts’ La Stecca 3.0.
2019 is a big year for design. Not only are we seeing designers pushing innovation and ingenuity more than ever—take German designer Alexander Schul, who used sheets of recycled high impact polystyrene to create a collection of furniture, or Reform Studio who developed a line of textiles from reused plastic bags—but it also marked 100 years of Bauhaus. Born from Weimar, Germany in 1919 the design movement envisioned a future in which art could be unified with the industrial.
Such a centenary is cause for celebration, and Milan Design Week marked the perfect occasion to introduce our new unisex collection Walter & Wassily, made with the same modernist spirit propagated by the Bauhaus movement.
But the Bauhaus era wasn’t all about functionality, it was a playground for new ideas, such as the infamous costumes created for Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet. Set against the architecturally inspiring backdrop of Isola Design Districts’ La Stecca 3.0, our Walter & Wassily launch party was inspired by the same expressive spirit, drawing in hundreds of guests, from the pool of creatively inclined minds in attendance at Milan Design Week.
During the course of the evening, a diverse crowd poured into a space that was both technologically alluring and nostalgic, echoing the spirit of Bauhaus in both shape and color. A fluorescent violet light embalmed the room and DJ sets by Rollodexx and Uabos ignited a vibrant energy onto the dancefloor, meanwhile, more relaxed partygoers reclined in iconic Wassily chairs provided by the team at Knoll, sipping on free beers courtesy of Nastro Azzurro Prime Brew. An eccentric and Kandinsky-colorful performance paid homage to the theatricality of Bauhaus dances, and invited the crowd to reflect upon the mechanical & human element that embodies Bauhaus design.
All in all, this was a night that captured the futuristic minimalism of the historic Bauhaus movement, and its lasting impact on the present day, as echoed in the Walter & Wassily frames. Similar to the ambition that helped craft our new range of eyewear, this was a party that sought to inspire and enhance what the neubau team has always advocated for; innovative and sustainable eyewear, guided by a modernist and minimalist spirit.
