Salone 2024: So Meta! Grocery Shopping with Seletti
Italian super-too-much brand Seletti—with its singular approach to furniture, lighting, objects and more—is celebrating Salone del Mobile with a meta grocery store. The Seletti Market @ Rinascente pays homage to the most historic department store in Milan. From April 11 to April 29, Seletti will be on the -1 floor “with a reinterpretation of a true 1960s supermarket.”
Seletti Market its is own mini-universe, with a brand logo, shopping bags, and staff uniforms. Shop the market’s shelves for iconic Seletti products, as well as special “fake” products created for the exhibit. From the Love Hurts You cactus to Monsters melamine tableware, Seletti products will be on display in a candi-colored, pop-inspired Milanese market. Wander through the aisles, choose your favorite products, and make purchases at a real checkout.
While the everyday shopping of quotidian life is not too exciting, Seletti Market revels in its replica status. The simulacra of a grocery store is a resplendent experience, as it’s a perfect miniaturized world of design—with neat rows of candelabra in place of canned foods, and piles of pillows instead of pumpkins.
The signs of grocery-store-ness are everywhere. Rows of shelving, stacks of products, display bins, sale sections—and actual signs. Seletti notes, “Descending from the ceiling will be a series of signs to enhance the ‘supermarket’ experience: posters replicating the style of discount flyers with dreamlike and surreal photos.” In a fantastic example of the replica becoming more real than the original, the Seletti Market logo is the same logo created for the brand’s founding in 1964.
New products for Seletti Market include Love Hurts You, a limited-edition boxed cactus holding a bandaged balloon. Simultaneously cartoonish and heartbreaking, Love Hurts You was envisioned by Gianpiero D’Alessandro, a designer and artist who has collaborated with some of the world’s best-known brands. D’Alessandro is also the co-founder, alongside Justin Bieber, of inBetweeners, a metaverse project (so it’s meta-meta—the only thing better would have been if Seletti Market also existed in virtual space within a computer-generated version of the Rinascente Milan Piazza Duomo).
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