Naturally, companies presented innovative, content-rich products designed with an eye towards both the acute and the naïve, metaphorical and evocative, emotional and poetic.

Not merely functional. This is due to the great ideas of Italian and foreign designers, but also to the great experience of the companies that realise those ideas, combining ever more adventurous technological and industrial experimentation with impeccable traditional craftsmanship.

The relationship between decoration and design is more intimate than ever, to the extent that decoration becomes an integral part of the design, and is sometimes its very essence.

Without doubt, nature and all its elements were a major source of inspiration for this year’s products, whether furniture, lamps or accessories: water and earth, and especially trees, leaves and flowers are currently the subjects dearest to designers, who deploy a “biological mimicry” in their textures and structures in order to give objects a poetic allure.

When forms depart from this more organic direction, they tend to veer toward interesting polygonal geometries such as diamond patterns and effects. The result is surprising and spectacular.

Increasingly frequent is the contamination and cross-pollination between the various figurative disciplines of art, architecture, fashion and design, which explore shared areas of inquiry, playing on the same motifs and emotions, giving rise to new creative possibilities.

One consequence of the strong propensity of fashion designers to create their own lines of furniture is the frequent syntony between the two fields in terms of trends, as evidenced by the ultra-glossy surfaces seen in this year’s furniture, signalling an assertive return of the shellac shine that dominated much of last season’s fashions.

The same holds true for the use of gold and silver, as well as the almost sartorial use of fabric, which personalises the design object as clothing does a beautiful woman.

It is this unprecedented use of fabric (real, fake, with effects) that redefines certain boundary lines of current creativity, generating constant exchanges of meaning between the themes of furniture and fashion, such that we see furniture designers devising plissé structures or macramé finishes taken directly from the field of fine tailoring.

What, then, are the boundaries? They are fine, almost imperceptible. What matters is to astound, to personalise.