Flos

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

Flos, from the Latin for “flower”, is one of the most famous lighting companies in the world. Its lamps, many of them born in the 1960s and still in production, have carried a large part of the history of Italian design.

A packaging material

Flos was founded in 1962 in Merano, in South Tyrol, as a small experimental workshop. It all began with an unusual material: cocoon, a resin that, sprayed onto a steel frame, forms a thin translucent skin, like a silkworm's cocoon. Imported from the United States by Arturo Eisenkeil, it had until then been used only for packaging. The furniture producer Dino Gavina and Cesare Cassina realised that it could become a lamp, and called in the brothers Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni and Tobia Scarpa. The Castiglionis' first cocoon lamps, the Taraxacum and Viscontea pendants (1960) and the Gatto table lamp, made for Eisenkeil, later became part of the Flos collection.

Arco and the others

In 1962 the Castiglionis designed some of the most famous lamps ever for Flos:

Arco, a great stainless-steel arc that carries the light over the table like a street lamp, resting on a block of Carrara marble;
Toio, a floor lamp built around a car headlight, an example of a “found object” in the manner of Marcel Duchamp;
Taccia, a table lamp whose reflector sits on its base like a bowl.

They were followed by the Splügen Bräu pendant (1964), designed for a Milan brewery, and the Snoopy table lamp (1967). In 1964 the company moved to Bovezzo, near Brescia, and Sergio Gandini joined it; he would lead it for decades.

Arteluce and the Compasso d'Oro

In 1974 Flos bought Arteluce, the historic company founded in 1936 by Gino Sarfatti, and added several of its models to the catalogue. In 1979 it won its first Compasso d'Oro with Parentesi by Achille Castiglioni and Pio Manzù, a lamp that slides along a cable stretched between ceiling and floor. More awards followed in the 1990s and in 2001 with May Day by Konstantin Grcic, a portable lamp with a hook handle.

Starck and the contemporaries

From the 1980s Flos worked for many years with Philippe Starck, who designed hits such as the small Miss Sissi table lamp and Ara. Antonio Citterio, Jasper Morrison, Marc Newson, Michael Anastassiades and the Bouroullec brothers have also worked with the company. Besides lamps for the home, Flos makes lighting systems for architecture. Since 2014 it has been controlled by the Investindustrial fund and belongs to the same group as B&B Italia and Louis Poulsen.