In Miami Beach, Gaetano Pesce Breaks into His Fashion Fame

At the age of 83, Gaetano Pesce is enjoying a celebrity career boom. As a poolside artist, designer, and architect at the Ritz in Miami Beach put it one humid afternoon recently, When I came here three days ago, someone stopped me in the street, recognized me!

Pesce, who has lived and worked in Brooklyn since 1983, was in town for Art Basel week to present a series of chairs he designed for the Bottega Venetas Spring-Summer 2023 show, held in Milan in September. Despite being responsible for more than his fair share of spectacularly collectible surreal furniture items, such as the curvaceous La Mamma, a sometimes controversial armchair in the abstract form of a woman held up by a ball and chain, Pesce is as surprised as anything what he did. one of trendy name in a world of fashion and design that devours novelty. (As I wrote last week in the GQ Show Notes newsletter, Art Base has emerged as a kind of fifth fashion week, making it a hospitable venue for design polymaths like Pesce.) Me, I’m not very good, he says. What’s good is that other people don’t do what they should. So the little things I do become very important.

Despite his elder-statesman status in the raging city of twenty rising stars, Pesce retained all the zest of his younger self: in the mid-60s, he wrote a manifesto against equality in architecture and design. When I asked him if he saw anything good that week at the art exhibition, he waved his hand dismissively. At the art show, there’s lots of decorations, lots of maquillage. In general very shallow. I see no innovation, he said. Pesce liked Goya and Michelangelo, artists who in his opinion did what artists should do: reflect deep truths about reality. And don’t get him started on the true cityscape of Miami Beach. If we look here, we see lots of buildings that are all the same, he said, with no strings attached. The International Style allows an architect to create the same building here, and the same building in Stockholm—the diversity of two different places demands different construction. But the International Style is very totalitarian.

Instead, with his Bottega Veneta commission, Pesce sought to capture what he saw as one of life’s most critical and ultimate truths: that we are all unique, and that uniqueness is the strength of humanity. In other words, in the world of Pesces, we are not Eames chairs of molded plywood, beautiful in our simplicity and replication. We’re more like one of his own creations instead: organic, gloopy, and even a little ugly. Literally, if you ask Pesce: In a way, chairs are the closest thing to humans, he says, explaining why chairs have captured his imagination for decades. Many of Pesce’s most famous designs mimic the human form, such as the colorful cabinets that resemble faces; for Pesce, the appeal of the chair, with its four legs and back, is obvious.