Spiros Coat Stand

“Simplicity is the most complex achievement in the world,” said Vico Magistretti. His virtuosity with purified design is evident in his first creation for Acerbis: the Spiros coat hanger. In fact, here he used a change of perspective to transform an everyday object — the broomstick — into an object of captivating essentialism, a coat hanger.

Vico Magistretti wrote a piece of history with Spiros, the coat rack made for the Morphos collection, a much imitated icon of international design that, in 1988, won an Honourable Mention for the ID Annual Design Review in New York and was included in the Permanent Design Collection at the Southwest Museum of Science and Technology in Dallas.

Born in Milan in 1920, Magistretti enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture at the Politecnico of Milan in 1939. Between 1943 and 1944 he moved to Switzerland, where he met Ernesto Nathan Rogers, a key influence on his education. He returned to Milan in 1945 where he graduated in Architecture from the Politecnico and immediately began his professional career. The 1950s were a fruitful period for Magistretti, who emerged as one of the most brilliant exponents of the “third generation”.

Over the next few years he began working a lot more as a designer as well as an architect, creating furniture and objects which will always be “classics” of modern-day production.