Aesop Launches Aposē, a Table Lamp Lathed, Cast and Blown Across Three European Workshops
For its third outing at Salone del Mobile in Milan, the brand unveiled its first piece of lighting — a limited-edition table lamp shaped from an enlarged version of its own aluminium packaging — inside an installation by Rodney Eggleston of March Studio at Santa Maria del Carmine
Aesop has spent nearly four decades lighting its stores like private rooms rather than retail floors, so the brand’s move into lighting design has a certain inevitability to it. At this year’s Salone del Mobile in Milan, the brand launched Aposē: a limited-edition table lamp named after the French à poser (‘to place’), with floor and ceiling versions to follow.
The starting point was a tube of Aesop packaging — the slim aluminium cylinder that holds some of the brand’s formulations — scaled up and cut through. The resulting proportions are unusual: 50 centimetres across, 36 centimetres tall, a squat disc of a thing rather than the slender silhouette the category tends toward. The sandcast brass plinth comes out of a German family foundry working since 1874, where molten metal is poured at 900°C into sand moulds and emerges with a rough, weighted surface. The lightweight shell above it is lathed from a few millimetres of brass in Scorzè. The glass crown that caps the whole thing is mouth-blown in Veneto, acid-bathed to a soft frost, and diffuses light with a gentle warmth.
Three workshops, three materials, one small object. That it has taken Aesop this long to produce a lamp of its own — after decades of specifying other designers’ pieces in every store — is part of the interest.
The Aposē trio, including two prototypes of the forthcoming floor and ceiling versions, was unveiled within The Factory of Light, an installation by Melbourne architect Rodney Eggleston of March Studio set in the cloister of Santa Maria del Carmine. Eggleston has built the structure from reclaimed construction scaffolding and printed tarpaulins of the kind that shroud Milan’s restoration works, cutting and reassembling them into a half-invented version of the city. In the sacristy, a wave of 10,000 amber Aesop bottles runs the length of the carved-timber panelling, with the three prototypes catching on the glass.
There is a pleasing circularity in all of this. The bottles along the sacristy wall hold what the aluminium tubes once did; the lamp borrows its shape from the tube; and the light it casts, filtered through frosted glass, is the same warm, low register Aesop has been lighting its stores with since the beginning.
Text by Katherine Ring
Images courtesy of Aesop
