Gufram is still the ultimate Italian design radical avant-guard From the 60s to Asap Rocky, we talked to Charley Vezza about Gufram's present and future

“The thing that intrigues me, however, is that in Italian the word "radical" is so similar to the word "root", as if to produce a great upheaval it was always necessary to have your feet firmly planted on the ground”. 

This is how Charley Vezza thinks today Global Creative Orchestrator by Gufram, one of the brands that marked the golden age of Italian design and that today is returning to be an object of desire for aesthetes all over the world. From the Pratone designed by Italian designers Giorgio Ceretti, Pietro Derossi, Riccardo Rosso in 1971 and re-proposed in a giant version in Piazza San Fedele in Milan during the last Design Week to the Cactus that appeared on the feeds of A$AP Rocky and Travis Scott, gufram's aesthetics have remained current in its radicality even in a historical moment where design has lost its charge of cultural avant-garde and trends burn movements before develop concretely. 

In particular, the mirror almost seems to be a gash in the contemporary world, a window to peek into another reality. The collection maintains the ironic lightness of Gufram also combining a dreamlike vision of the future, today a topic mostly associated with metaverse and technology, in which design does not always find space: "Future for me is synonymous with innovation because when we imagine it we always think of a more advanced time than ours. After all, if tomorrow had the same characteristics as today, we would live in an eternal present."

The vision of contemporary Gufram embodies the hybrid and radical nature that inspired the foundation of the brand: "Our icons travel in a world between art and design; if you think about it, even today I don't think you can associate Gufram with a well-defined sector". The sector categories today are not barriers but rather become stimuli for the creativity of brands so ubiquitous and interesting as to be able to touch very distant sectors, as Charley Vezza confirms:

"Oggi forse mi interesserebbe un progetto che finisse sugli scaffali degli alimentari: so che state pensando a un biscottino a forma di cactus da inzuppare nel latte, ma non volevo essere così didascalico!"