Alias

Alias is a furniture company in the province of Bergamo, known for chairs and tables with slender, light structures, often in metal or in wood worked with industrial techniques. Many of its products have won the Compasso d'Oro.

The Spaghetti chair

In the late 1970s four young Lombard entrepreneurs, Enrico Baleri, Marilisa Decimo, Carlo and Francesco Forcolini, founded a small company making furniture and household objects together with the designer Giandomenico Belotti, its first creative lead. The year was 1979, the place Grumello del Monte. The first products were Belotti's Spaghetti chair, with seat and back made of PVC cords stretched over a steel frame, now in the collections of MoMA and the Triennale Design Museum, and Vico Magistretti's Broomstick collection.

Among the big groups

In 1983 Baleri and Decimo left the company, which continued with the Forcolinis and Ernesto Gismondi, founder of Artemide; in 1992 Alias became wholly owned by Artemide. In 2001 it was bought by Cassina and in 2007 it joined the Poltrona Frau group. In these years came two chairs awarded the Compasso d'Oro: Riccardo Blumer's Laleggera (1996, Compasso d'Oro 1998), a featherweight wooden chair, and Alberto Meda's Teak, awarded in 2011.

Independent again

In 2010 the majority passed to Renato Stauffacher and Andrea Sanguineti, who focused on “zero-mile” production with suppliers and craftsmen from the province of Bergamo; in 2015 Alias left the group and became independent again. In 2011 it put into production an armchair designed by Pio Manzù, a leading 1960s car designer, which had never gone beyond the prototype stage. Alongside Belotti, Blumer and Meda, the catalogue includes designs by Mario Botta, Michele De Lucchi, Jasper Morrison, James Irvine, Alfredo Häberli, Nendo, Patrick Norguet and Eugeni Quitllet.

Sources

• Wikipedia – Alias (azienda) (it)