The importance of couples in fashion, art and architecture

Ego-mania has been over for a long time. The idea of the isolated, solitary genius who designs a collection or a project in an empty room is an outdated concept, even for the most popular storytellers. Creatives are never alone, whether working in large teams or sharing the work with another person. It’s the support and collaboration that helps to get perspective and to constantly have an external point of view on one's work. Love, in all its complex nuances, is a theme almost always examined superficially. Two people make an army: it’s not just about the dual relationship, where one inspires and the other produces, because the complexity of creative couples generates clashes, encounters, setbacks, and opposing visions that find common ground capable of shaping and resizing projects and sometimes making them accessible to a wider audience. In this tribute to creative couples, we explore how duality can make a project perfect through three examples.

Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli

Legend has it that the two came together thanks to one of those unexpected elements that somehow unite people: hatred. Bertelli, who came from a family involved in leather goods in Tuscany, was copying Miuccia Prada’s early creations for a time, just as the designer had taken the reins of her family’s business, a historic Milanese workshop. It’s said there was a furious confrontation at a trade fair, where Miuccia yelled at the gruff Tuscan who was copying her. In the end, Bertelli, aware he had indeed stolen Prada's designs, pointed out that “his” copies were built much better. Soon after, love sparked a perfect partnership that years later would create one of the strongest independent fashion empires in the world. Bertelli, with entrepreneurial vision that only Italy’s provinces can offer, and the young political activist with a revolutionary aesthetic vision are the perfect example of a couple who managed to create a perfectly functioning union. He has sailing, she has contemporary art: both cultivate passions that keep them engaged in separate realms. In business, as in love, preserving the couple means maintaining personal space.

Michèle Lamy and Rick Owens

Michèle Lamy and Rick Owens form an inseparable duo, capable of erasing the boundary between private and public life to offer themselves as an open universe, ready to welcome anyone who wants to enter. They met in Los Angeles in 1990: it was Lamy who hired Owens as a pattern maker for her brand, active between performance and underground fashion in LA at the time. The world surrounding Owenscorp – based in Italy with a turnover of about €125 million – doesn’t establish rigid roles between the two. Owens is obsessed with the product, the garment itself. Lamy, on the other hand, brings a sensibility more akin to contemporary art than traditional fashion. Her strength also lies in stepping outside the boundaries of the brand to declare a broader love, helping to keep the brand in a state of self-referential sacredness. Lamy wears Comme des Garçons, collaborates with Nico Vascellari for LAVASCAR, designs jewelry, curates the brand's furnishings, and introduced A$ap Rocky to art by taking him to international fairs. Their dualism allows the brand to remain true to itself while also exploring new realms. In a couple that’s anything but binary, where love goes beyond the body and takes the shape of a bond between muse and creator, Lamy and Owens show that there’s still room in fashion for a free, independent, and at the same time economically solid way of thinking. Even if, from time to time, a little outside injection from the world of sportswear is needed — without ever giving up their own voice.

Charles and Ray Eames

Even in architecture, as in fashion and art, collaboration has always been central, as in the case of Charles and Ray Eames, a couple who revolutionized the idea of home and design. We all surely remember the iconic Lounge chair developed by the couple: it, too, stems from the union of two brilliant thinkers. Before meeting Charles, Ray was part of the American abstractionists. Her background as a sculptor, textile designer, and painter greatly influenced the duo’s aesthetic in all their work in design and architecture, including their unmistakable color palette. Their country home, where work life and private life deeply intertwine, is a manifesto of how industrial design can be integrated with surrounding nature. In all these examples, collaboration is organic — each handles a creative aspect and shares it with the other, each is a fundamental piece of every project. Creation, after all, is like a dance: it's better with two.