Chiara Alessi

Chiara Alessi is a celebrated author and design historian, known for her insightful works on Italian design. She has authored several influential books, including After 2000: New Italian Design (Laterza, 2014), Designerless Design (Laterza, 2016), My Great-Grandparents Coffee Pot (Utet, 2018), Dear Things: The Objects That Change Our Lives (Longanesi, 2021), and The State of Things (Longanesi, 2022).

She serves on the advisory board for Electa and edits their OILA’ series on women, as part of the Twentieth Century Project.

During the 2020 lockdown, Alessi launched the #designinpigiama project on Twitter, sharing daily insights into Italian design history across ninety episodes, amassing millions of views.

Her film, tied to the podcast “La mia Olivetti” [My Olivetti], received the prestigious La Stampa’s Archivissima award.

For the Post, she produced the podcasts Certe Cose [Certain Things] (2022), exploring object inventories from key historical moments over the past fifty years, and Cosa c’entra? [What does it have to do with it?] (2023), which connects seemingly unrelated facts to physical, graphic, anonymous, legendary, or cultural objects.