At DesignJunction Edit Milan, Tom Dixon took over a 400m² abandoned theatre within Casa dell’Opera Nazionalle Balilla.

Inside The Cinema, Tom created an entertainment show highlighting his latest designs through a series of extraordinary installations and light shows.

Tom Dixon Cinema Event

Official photography by Peer Lindgreen

Animations by dedece

Milan – Design Entertainment Capital

By Henrietta Thompson
Telegraph UK

Taking the entertaining theme to new design heights, Tom Dixon decided to literally put on a show at his exhibition space, a converted cinema.

With Bezar-founder Bradford Shellhammer (on vocals), publisher Robert Violette (on drums), Dixon on bass and his studio’s “Steph from accounts” as a Blondie-comparable star turn on keyboards and vocals – the newly-formed Rough’s debut gig was a resounding success.

For 2015 Milan has really become a party town like never before.

Dixon and friends are simply acknowledging that the Salone del Mobile – once a B2B furniture fair which was mainly about servicing the Italian export industry – has evolved into a global carnival, attracting 400,000 people (a lot for a relatively small city).

“Those people are not there to buy wholesale furniture, they’re there to get up to date on trends and enjoy a corporate holiday,” Tom Dixon comments. “The reality is people are there for fun. We felt we might as well acknowledge what’s really going on here and try to entertain people.”

When you’ve got 2,000 brands in Milan all doing jazz hands and competing for attention, it is harder and harder to get people to pay attention to your message. “So the idea of the cinema is about saying, come into a darkened space where we can control your experience a bit more, and add depth. I think it’s good to wake and shake people up a bit, to get them to spend a bit more time and open their ears, noses and mouths.”