Raritas, Milan Design Week: SOFT PARADE by Job Smeets
Milan
21-26 april 2026
On the occasion of the first edition of Salone Raritas, to be held at the Salone fairground for 2026 Milan Design Week, (April 21-26) the Belgian artist Job Smeets presents SOFT PARADE, an original collection conceived for the new international player Mouromtsev Design Editions and curated by Maria Cristina Didero. Softness created in collaboration with Gufram.
about
Presented for the first time during 2026 Milan Design Week, SOFT PARADE frames a reflection on the thematic of “softness” (standing for kindness, openness) not as consolation, but as a critical position articulated in response to current and general contemporary conditions of uncertainty. The response is an ironical game of play with concepts and forms which plays with double layers of meanings, that try to depict a human major feelings and contradictions.
For Job Smeets softness is not opposed to hardness, but it operates alongside it. It is not a retreat from reality, but a way of negotiating it. In this collection, irony sits at the core, allowing contradiction to remain visible and tension to be held. Rather than offering comfort, the pieces of works articulate a measured optimism grounded in conviction: a belief in humour and tenderness as deliberate positions to experience the world.
The collection comprises six singular pieces, from different typologies of objects (daybed, carpet, floor lamp, table, coffee table, and lounge chair), each structured around a reversal of expectation and play of forms. Objects associated with fragility, danger, discipline or seriousness are reconfigured through material and symbolic displacement. For examples, a feather daybed, fragile and by nature incapable of bearing weight, becomes a support for the body. A tire, symbolizing infinity and moulded from a ready-made is a crucial object for humanity and emblem of speed and industry - emits light and bears the statement ‘The World Will Be Saved By Beauty’. Pink bubble gum emerges from candy dispensers that overflow upwards to form a dining table, allowing childhood joy to accompany a functional object. Fire, historically a threat, an untamed element becomes here a place of rest. Strength is expressed through softness rather than force; danger is neutralised through care. Everything is dressed in a healthy dose of irony as our life would be pretty much unbearable without it!
Each piece of SOFT PARADE collection is built around a precise mismatch between function and image, promise and delivery, appearance and use, functionality and storytelling. What once demanded discipline now offers ease; what once appeared superficial becomes foundational. Softness does not erase tension - it absorbs it, holds it, and makes it livable.
Studio Job’s practice has long occupied the intersection of popular imagery, historical reference, and sculptural rigor. In SOFT PARADE, this vocabulary is refined into a coherent meditation on vulnerability, belief, and endurance. The works are immediately legible yet resistant to simplification - with a smile on our face. Through the curatorial framework developed by Maria Cristina Didero, SOFT PARADE reads design as a critical language able to look at the world where we live in and comment it. In a moment that often equates resilience with hardness, the project proposes an alternative ethic: softness as a structural condition, kindness as a way of being and irony as a mode of care and a way to survive.
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