Dedar Presents ‘Weaving Anni Albers’ at Milan Design Week 2025

At Milan Design Week 2025, Italian textile brand Dedar unveils Weaving Anni Albers, a new exhibition and fabric collection in collaboration with the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation. Hosted on the sixteenth floor of the Torre Velasca, the showcase marks the debut of five jacquard fabrics that reinterpret Albers’ iconic works from 1936 to 1974. With a mix of archival reverence and modern experimentation, the project repositions Albers’s weaving not as static legacy, but as a dynamic source for future creation.

DESIGN

The exhibition is conceived as a hybrid between archive and loom, designed by Frederik De Wachter and Alberto Artesani of DWA Design Studio. Modular displays house the textiles alongside archive drawers and vintage office furniture by BBPR Studio, the very architects of the Torre Velasca. Visitors are encouraged to open drawers, engage with materials, and uncover texts and photographs, fostering an interactive experience. The installation also features a short film directed by Alessandro del Vigna, offering further context to the fabric collection and the design process behind it.

Caterina and Raffaele Fabrizio, Dedar’s CEO and Creative Director, describe their encounter with Albers’s work as a moment of profound creative awakening. “Art gives us courage,” they say, referencing Albers’s own words, and point to the collection as the result of open-ended exploration. Rather than replicate existing works, the collection responds to Albers’s approach, transforming her compositions into usable fabrics for upholstery, curtains, and interiors, while maintaining the artist’s original sense of tactility and abstraction.

This collaboration is also deeply rooted in technical excellence. The five new fabrics reinterpret four of Albers’s “pictorial weavings” and one drawing previously only seen on paper. Dedar’s approach balances fidelity to Albers’s original intent with the possibilities of today’s jacquard production techniques.

For the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, the collaboration represents a long-held aspiration realized. “The people at Dedar, with their wonderful feeling for thread and extraordinary knowledge of weaving technique, have done a superlative job,” says Foundation Director Nicholas Fox Weber. “We feel that Anni would have been thrilled.”

Weaving Anni Albers is not a conclusion, but the opening statement of an ongoing dialogue between Albers’s legacy and Dedar’s textile vision. The exhibition and the collaboration together affirm that in the right hands, a thread is never just a thread, it is a line of thought, and a promise of what’s still to come.