Sofia Mantoni

The right questions, asked early, save more money than any negotiation later. This is not a cynical observation about the design industry. It is a practical one about how projects go wrong — and they almost never go wrong because the designer was incompetent or the client was difficult. They go wrong because two people began a project with different assumptions about what it was, and nobody asked the questions that would have revealed the gap before money was spent and decisions were made....

Most materials arrive in the studio with no plan attached to them. That is deliberate. This is perhaps the most counterintuitive thing about how the Reshaping Collection is made. There is no design brief, no mood board created in advance, no sketch that precedes the material. The material comes first — already present, already carrying its history — and the form follows from working with it, not from deciding what it should be before touching it. This is slower than designing from a drawing....

The first layer is always the most uncertain. By the final one, the form has decided what it wants to be. This is true of paper, which is where the Reshaping Collection began. It is true of cord and yarn, which are coming. And it is especially true of fabric — the most unpredictable, most alive, and most demanding material the studio has worked with so far. Luna began as a question. A 64cm polystyrene disc, a length of fabric, and no fixed idea of what the surface should look like. The answer...