- Silence!
[speaks foreign language]
[regal music]
Hello Vogue.
This is Francesco Risso, we're in Milan,
and this is my nest.
Today, I'm very happy to show you a bit around.
We are in one of the oldest streets of Milan,
and this is a very particular building
that was built in the middle of the 18th century.
Some rooms I repainted at least seven times.
This living room, actually.
This is the living room
and the first object I'm gonna show you today
is here.
[upbeat music]
So this very strange cement vase
that I made with a very dear friend,
a great sonographer, Mario Toral.
One day we just thought,
oh, let's dip some sunflowers in cement,
and then we dipped the whole vase in cement.
It's a very heavy vase,
sometimes I just get scared
that it might break my table in two,
but it has become a very strange
and powerful object.
When I have friends at the house,
nobody can see each other,
they just want to hide behind it.
Nobody can actually see themselves,
but finally at the end of the night,
when somebody had a few drinks,
it becomes literally like a very powerful totem
when everybody dance around it.
So this is one of my favorite objects, actually,
probably the favorite objects.
These are hands by [indistinct]
She paints hands all the time.
Her hands have a secret about humanity.
For me, I'm symbolically very attached
as it actually is very connected with the way I work,
with the way I like to do things,
which is absolutely through the use of the hand.
And that actually makes me very emotional
[calm music]
And now we're gonna go and see the dining room
or what I prefer to call the music room.
[calm music]
And this is my cello.
I do play in the mornings or in the late evenings,
which is not very good for my neighbors,
but I'm learning and I'm learning.
It is to me, a gate to another world.
And it's a completely different approach of reading
and of learning a different kind of language.
It's a very delicate instrument.
And I just love how music opens your mind
in a different way.
I just wish I could do it more.
I'm not gonna perform it right now,
but maybe in a few years.
[bright music]
This little book, it's very dear to me,
it's called "Groupies and Other Girls".
I'm not just attached to this book itself.
My dear friend, Eliana and collaborator,
she turned it into a card for me
for my birthday.
She wrote, I wish you that,
she painted it all,
in the paths you will walk upon,
may they always be filled with endless love.
Apart from being a beautiful hand painted card,
it's a very strange book that tells stories about
groupies in the '70s following rock stars.
Maybe that's what I actually would love to do
if I wasn't a fashion designer.
Enough with the groupies.
I'm gonna take you into another room
to show you something that I'm really proud of.
I had a lot of fun painting all my curtains of the house
during the months of lockdown.
There's no piece of fabric here that it's not been painted
and it's about lines and freehand.
Sometimes you just need to use a ruler
and it's actually quite fun.
I do treasure that moment
as a very intimate moment to rebuild the creativity.
A nice connection also towards my team
where we started doing these calls
and everyone was actually making something in their house
with their curtains, with their things.
During that period, I also had time to take care of
one of my favorite things in our planet, which is plants.
You might have noticed I love plants.
These creatures, I bought them and I didn't know
where to put them
and then now they're just hanging from the roof.
I feel a profound sense of calm with green around me.
So the more I could get, the more I put it in the house.
They're very unforgiving plants.
They're not normal plants.
They do need water, but in a very specific
and controlled way.
I love letting this one grow and grow and grow
until it becomes a table cloth.
And then my mom gets here to visit me and she cuts it.
I do forget to water them.
Sometimes they tell you, so it's fine.
This is my Nanda Vigo that I found through a design dealer
that found it in her basement.
Her basement was designed completely slanted like this panel
and with all these like yellow and black stripes
running through, which is quite harsh and surreal somehow.
She's probably one of my favorite designer
that worked around the '50s, '60s, and '70s.
I do hang my notes normally there, but, for now,
there's just a picture of my mom.
And this is where I like to gather my thoughts,
in this little corner.
Sometimes I draw here.
For instance, there are some drawings of the last show set
which actually started from here.
I wanted it to be a symbolic volcano.
And at the beginning I thought, oh, how nice
it would have been to recuperate all this soil.
But then we just discovered that it would have been like
at least like 60 days of bringing soil to the space,
so it became a symbolic volcano.
But this is exactly where I like to have calm thoughts
after the office or before the office.
Since I was a kid I was extremely attracted by painting
and colors and words, but also owning artists' paintings.
So now I'm gonna show you something quite special to me.
[bright music]
This painting is the first painting I bought
when I was able to afford to buy one.
It's by Kiki Smith.
I love her work as it talks about gender and fertility
and so much about ethnicity.
And it's a very powerful group of kitty cats and a cat.
The more you look at it,
the more you notice the random details
of the little kitty cats being there.
It's very sweet, but yet also quite scary I must say.
But I guess I'm tired now. And I will go to sleep.
[calm music]
I get very shy about this room as it's filled with horses
and it's quite childish.
Definitely not the erotic dream someone would think about,
but it's very calming.
It was interesting to design these pieces
as they're completely wrong.
The stripes are mounted with each other.
I love the chicness and the raw of it all.
It's interesting to dive into the intimacy of an object,
to the intimacy of a bedroom,
the idea of dressing and undressing objects
that are actually very private.
They can become objects for the life of everyday.
And I hope you really enjoy this tour but I must say,
and forgive me, but now I really have to go to sleep.
[bright music]