Amsterdam – Dutch design brand Moooi is brimming with character. So it seems apt that The Party, a series of five wall lamps in the shapes of human faces, will kick off the brand's More Moooi Moments events.
Moooi's Moments will throw out the seasonal product launch calendar, turning the annual Salone del Mobile into only one of a number of events held throughout the year. New products will be introduced one by one and presented in the brand's signature scenographic way.



Top to bottom: The characters include Coco, inspired by Austrian inventor and actress Hedy Lamar, Bert, who is bitter with jealousy, and the monocled Mayor.
The Party are abstracted faces cast in warm grey ceramic and roughly glazed. Designers Jos Kranen and Johannes Gille of Kranen/Gille, two Design Academy Eindhoven alumni based in 's-Hertogenbosch in the southern Netherlands, restricted themselves to a 'dogmatic' formal language. They used only rudimentary geometric shapes, as they had previously in products like their Luftschiff lamp for Functionals and the Base clock for LEFF.
Developed as a public art concept based on the German neidköpfe or fratzen tradition of hanging masks to frighten bad spirits away, for Moooi the lights were imagined as characters in a narrative: 'We were imagining a party during the Roaring '20s in New York or Berlin,' said Gille. 'Or, think of a ball in a grand hotel on the shores of an Italian lake: Riva boats, champagne pyramids. Glitter and glamour, but underneath, a layer of suspense.'