By Marianna Cerini, CNN
Milan (CNN) — If Sabato De Sarno were to distill the past year into a single idea, the gift of time might be it. After a short but widely scrutinized tenure as creative director at Gucci — where his restrained aesthetic struggled to gain commercial traction during a broader downturn in the luxury sector — he has been moving across the worlds of design and art with new projects at a more deliberate pace. Perhaps it’s his way of gently pushing back against the fashion industry’s tendency to reduce careers to their most recent headline.
“I was there 19 months,” he said of Gucci, “but I’ve worked in fashion for 23 years.”
His departure, announced by the house in February 2025, came abruptly, and a surprise to many. But since leaving Gucci, he’s kept busy, from partnering up with a Milan-based initiative during Pride Month to present the film “Il Capitone” by Neapolitan director Camilla Salvatore, to creating “Napoli Infinita,” a book celebrating his hometown, Naples, through the works of more than 35 contemporary artists.
Now, during Milan Design Week, he is curating “INSIEME,” an exhibition bringing together twelve Italian artisanal companies, from glassmakers and ceramicists to weavers and stonecutters, to make visible what usually goes unseen: the process of making things.
As De Sarno puts it: “I kept thinking about how, when you go to an exhibition or a fair, what you usually see are finished objects. What interested me with ‘INSIEME’ was turning the attention on everything that comes before that, everything that leads up to the final piece: the mistakes, the decisions, the timing, and those moments when you have to choose a direction and can’t go back.”
“More broadly, it’s something that applies to fashion, too,” he added. “Today, everything revolves around the product, while what goes into it is often overlooked. We’re living in a moment dominated by images, where speed seems to matter more than anything else. But I’m not interested in hype. I’m interested in how things are made.”
Set within the former changing rooms of Piscina Cozzi, a historic indoor public swimming pool in Milan, “INSIEME” — meaning “together” in Italian — aims to do just that. Participants range from storied names such as Venini, Rubelli and Henraux to lesser-known ventures like Bottega Vazzoler and Artieri 1895, alongside Bonacina, Fornace Brioni, Glas Italia, De Castelli, Solimene, Fratelli Levaggi and Amini.
Among those who helped shape the curation were design duo Tipstudio, which oversaw the exhibition design; French artist JR, who contributed a site-specific installation magnifying the artisans’ faces across the building’s façade; and Vanity Fair Italia, which produced the show.
The exhibition moves through a sequence of narrow corridors and intimate chambers, where surfaces are partially veiled. In one hallway, Henraux presents three slabs of unfinished marble. Left deliberately unworked, the focus is shifted away from the final object and toward the material itself. Elsewhere, Solimene juxtaposes an original Sirena made of ceramic, sourced from its archive in Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, with a contemporary version created for the exhibition. Presented side by side, the two reveal subtle differences in form and execution, tracing how a single idea can evolve over time.
The result is a show that places people, rather than products, at its center.
“I like to pay attention, to spend time with things and others, to go deeper. It’s always been both the starting point and, in a way, the end point of everything I do,” said De Sarno. “Even when I was at Gucci, that didn’t change. From the outside, everything may seem fast, but for me it never really was.”
It’s an approach that may seem at odds with the fashion industry,