Missoni x Alessandra Roveda: A House Made Entirely of Crochet

ART & CULTURE · MILAN

Reading time: 9 min

In April 2019, Missoni’s Milan showroom stopped selling clothes for a week and became a house, and every object inside it, from the television to the toothbrush glass, was hand crocheted in the brand’s own colours. Alessandra Roveda, an industrial design graduate who learned the stitch from her grandmother, built the installation entirely by hand. The result restages, in wool, the exact journey the Missoni zigzag itself made in reverse.

---

Missoni’s showroom on Via Solferino, in Milan’s Brera Design District, gave up its usual role for Milan Design Week 2019. From 6 to 14 April, overlapping the Salone del Mobile.Milano trade fair dates of 9 to 14 April, the building held Home Sweet Home, an installation by the crochet artist Alessandra Roveda, staged at the invitation of Missoni’s creative director Angela Missoni.

Nothing in the four rooms was left unworked. A front garden held crocheted rabbits, watering cans and cacti. A living space combined dining room, lounge and kitchen, its shelves stocked with knitted sushi and wine bottles and its television swallowed under multicoloured wool. A bedroom carried knitted artwork on the walls alongside actual Missoni clothing, itself already patterned in the brand’s zigzag. A back garden, fitted out like a memory of childhood, held a rocking horse, a bicycle, a telescope and a scatter of toys, all worked in yarn. Visitors did not walk through the rooms. They viewed them from outside, through the showroom’s windows, the way a passer-by looks into a lit house at night.

Roveda made every piece by hand. There is no printed textile standing in for a crocheted one anywhere in the installation, and that distinction is the whole argument of the piece: a technique usually kept to scarves and blankets was scaled up to cover an entire furnished interior, using nothing but a hook, wool and the amount of time that takes.

The pairing was not an accident of scheduling. Missoni has spent decades treating pattern as something built by hand before it is ever built by machine, and Roveda’s installation put that history back on display in its most literal possible form.

A house with nothing left unworked

Walk the four settings in order and the ambition of the brief becomes clear. The front garden staged an entrance: a lawn of green wool, a scatter of crocheted cacti in terracotta pots, watering cans with looped-wool spouts, and rabbits sitting upright among the plants as if caught mid-hop. It set the register for everything behind it, somewhere between a doll’s house and a fairy tale, before a visitor had even reached the door.

Inside, the living space did the most work. A dining table was laid with crocheted place settings; a kitchen counter carried sushi rolls worked stitch by stitch in the brand’s colour range, next to bottles of wine rendered in the same yarn. A television sat mid-room entirely wrapped in multicoloured wool, its screen as textured as its housing, turning the one object in most living rooms that is never touched or restyled into the piece hardest to look away from.

The bedroom took a quieter register. Knitted artworks hung on the walls, and actual Missoni garments, cut from the brand’s own zigzag knits, were arranged alongside Roveda’s crocheted pieces, so that the factory-made pattern and the hand-made one sat in the same room without a visible seam between them. The back garden closed the sequence on childhood rather than furniture: a rocking horse, a bicycle propped against a wall, a telescope aimed at nothing in particular, and toys left as if a child had just stepped away. The Italian art critic Mariuccia Casadio, writing about the installation at the time, described the effect as a world in which reality becomes a fairytale, with surreal and playful presences appearing throughout the rooms. It is a fair account of what the four settings actually do: they do not decorate a house, they replace its objects with softer, warmer versions of themselves.

Alessandra Roveda, and the grandmother behind the technique

Alessandra Roveda was born in Milan on 21 April 1978 and trained as an industrial designer at the Politecnico di Milano, spending an exchange year at an art and design college in Exeter, England, before returning to Italy. Her practice today runs on two tracks, crochet and cinema, and she divides her time between Milan and Rome.

She has been open about where the technique itself comes from. She has described her crocheted view of the world as rooted in her grandmother’s patient artistry, and she has said, in her own words, that she has knitted since she was a child, that crochet is a craft, an art and a language. What began as scarves and hats in childhood became, over the following decades, a way of reworking entire objects: chairs, furniture, household items and, in Missoni’s case, whole rooms.

Roveda’s technique is not limited to wool. Across her body of work she has crocheted with cotton, nylon, acrylic, silk, torn linen strips, cut plastic bags, cable and wire, choosing the material to fit the object being remade rather than working in one signature yarn. Her stated aim, in her own description of the practice, is to give a new lease of life to forgotten or discarded objects and furniture, reclaiming pieces that would otherwise be thrown away and reworking them for a more contemporary eye. That approach had already been staged publicly before Missoni called her: in November 2011, her exhibition ¡Maravilla! filled the Agatha Ruiz de la Prada store on Via Pietro Maroncelli in Milan with crocheted furniture, including a chair with a heart-shaped backrest among its centrepieces. Home Sweet Home, eight years later, took the same method and applied it at the scale of an entire house rather than a single room of furniture.

The zigzag Missoni mechanised, and the crochet that took it back by hand

Missoni was founded in 1953 by Ottavio Missoni, known as Tai, and Rosita Jelmini, who married that April in Golasecca and set up a small knitwear workshop in the basement of the family house, continuing production Ottavio had already begun in Trieste in 1948 with wool tracksuits. Rosita brought more than a marriage to the venture. Her maternal grandparents had founded a factory near Golasecca making shawls and embroidered fabric, and that inherited knowledge of textile manufacturing shaped the business from its earliest days, first trading as Maglificio Jolly in Gallarate before the Missoni name reached shop floors at La Rinascente in the mid-1950s.

The detail that connects most directly to Roveda’s installation dates to 1962. That year, the Missonis rediscovered Raschel knitting machines, industrial looms that had, until then, been used only to make shawls, and adapted them to produce brightly coloured, lightweight dresses instead. Feeding multiple colours of yarn through the machine unevenly produced an irregular, flame-like chevron across the fabric, a technique the house still calls fiammato, and that chevron became the zigzag the Missoni name is now built on. In other words, the pattern that defines the brand did not start as a fashion sketch. It started as an industrial reworking of machinery designed for handmade shawls, mechanised so that a hand technique could be produced at speed and at scale.

Roveda’s installation runs that history the other way. Where the Missonis took a shawl-making machine and used it to mechanise a handmade effect, Roveda took the finished zigzag language, the colour range, the pattern logic, and put it back into the hands of a single crochet hook, object by object, stitch by stitch, with none of the speed the Raschel machine was built to deliver. A visitor standing in the bedroom, looking at a factory-knitted Missoni jacket next to a crocheted cushion in the same palette, was looking at both ends of that sixty-year loop in the same room: the moment craft became industry, and an artist’s decision to turn it back.

Angela Missoni’s yearly stage for outside artists

Home Sweet Home was not an isolated commission. Angela Missoni, who ran the house’s creative direction at the time, had used the Via Solferino showroom the previous year to host the American textile artist Rachel Hayes, whose installation Blowing in the Wind filled the same space with large-scale, hand-sewn patchwork textiles in 2018. Read together, the two years show a showroom being used deliberately as a stage for artists working outside the fashion system, chosen for their handling of colour and material rather than for any connection to ready-to-wear.

The exhibition design for Roveda’s installation was handled by Angelo Jelmini, working through his Milan studio AAAHHHAAA, who built the four room settings that gave the crocheted objects a believable domestic context rather than presenting them as isolated art pieces on plinths. That staging decision matters: a crocheted television or a crocheted rocking horse reads very differently sitting alone in a gallery than it does inside a lounge or a back garden built to scale around it, furniture and architecture doing the work of making the wool convincing as a real household object rather than a craft demonstration.

Where the practice went next

Roveda’s work with crochet continued well beyond Milan Design Week 2019. During the pandemic she produced My Funny Quarantine, a project addressing the strange domestic stretch of lockdown through the same hand technique she had used to cover Missoni’s showroom, later featured on Fuorisalone TV. Her work is represented through Galleria Paola Colombari, and she has continued to move between crochet installation and her parallel career in cinema, based between Milan and Rome.

What Home Sweet Home demonstrated, and what her later work has continued to argue, is that crochet does not have to stay at the scale of a garment or a blanket to hold together as a serious material practice. Given a full house and a serious colour language to work from, the technique can carry an entire domestic environment, room by room, without losing the handmade quality that makes it worth doing by hand in the first place.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to describe Home Sweet Home as a photogenic stunt built for a single week of design fair foot traffic, a house wrapped in wool for the cameras and then unpicked. That reading misses what actually happened inside those four rooms. Roveda did not decorate a showroom. She rebuilt, by hand, a pattern language that Missoni itself had spent sixty years mechanising, and she did it using the one technique that language could never fully escape: the crochet and knit stitching that shawl-makers were using long before a Raschel machine ever touched it.

That is what makes the installation more than a design week set piece. A crocheted television or a crocheted rocking horse is a striking image on its own, but placed inside a full house, room after room, worked entirely by one artist’s hands, it becomes an argument about where a fashion house’s signature pattern actually began. Missoni turned a handmade shawl technique into an industrial process in 1962. Roveda, working stitch by stitch through an entire domestic interior in 2019, turned it back.

Home Sweet Home ran for a single week and has not been restaged since, but the argument it made travels well beyond that week. A brand built on one of fashion’s most recognisable patterns invited an artist to prove that the pattern still works without the machine, object by object, in a house nobody could actually live in and nobody was meant to.