GEBRÜDER THONET VIENNA / MICKEY
2023

Gebrüder Thonet Vienna renews their collaboration with India Mahdavi: for the second year in a row, the unmistakable style of the internationally renowned architect and designer meets the Austrian brand’s emblematic curved lines, giving life to a new dining chair and lounge chair that will be on show at Salone del Mobile. In response to the invitation of the historic company Gebrüder Thonet Vienna, India Mahdavi has extended the Loop family, which already included a lounge chair and a banquette presented in 2022, with a newly designed dining chair and a lounge chair, called Mickey for its characteristic “ears” that recall those of a mouse, a palpable echo to Mahdavi's ‘childhood heroes’.

In the words of India Mahdavi, ‘The Mickey chair is high and comfy but also embracing, colourful and kind. A friend to cherish and with big ears, who listens to all your fears.’

To express the company’s ancestral know-how, India Mahdavi stayed true to the motion, pursuing the line without lifting her pencil. This continuous thread, which acts as the Loop’s structure, coils itself up to form the chair’s articulation, leaving two loops bent in its wake. The seductive curls that characterise the Loop push the boundaries of possibility – India Mahdavi demands of the bent beech wood to double its efforts in order to amplify its beauty and roundness.

In the new Loop dining chair, the seat upholstered in yellow wool harmoniously matches to the natural essence of the wooden structure, while the Mickey armchair combines a black wood structure in slight contrast with two different nuances of green upholstery, highlighting the piece’s playful soul.

“Gebrüder Thonet Vienna is the only manufacturer in the world that enables you to translate a free hand drawing by giving it a wooden materiality of that quality” says India Mahdavi.