Peter Do × FLOS - VESAK

This project was developed during the final year of studies at the Politecnico di Milano, as part of a collaborative design research brief bringing together two distinct but deeply resonant creative universes: Peter Do, the Vietnamese-American fashion designer known for his rigorous, body-conscious approach to garment construction, and FLOS, the Italian lighting company whose legacy is built on the belief that light is not a function, it is a presence.
The project was conceived and developed as a group collaboration, uniting different perspectives, sensibilities, and disciplinary backgrounds under a single design proposition. Working collectively became part of the methodology itself: the exchange of ideas, the friction of different approaches, and the negotiation of a shared visual language mirrored the very dialogue the project sought to explore, between body and space, between shadow and form.
The Conceptual Ground:
Peter Do's design philosophy is rooted in structure as care, garments that hold the body with precision, that understand tension and release, that treat the human form not as a surface to decorate but as an architecture to honor. His work is defined by restraint: the decision to remove is as deliberate as the decision to add.
FLOS operates within a parallel logic. Since its founding in 1962 in Merano, Italy, the company has commissioned the most demanding minds in design, Castiglioni, Starck, Bouroullec, Barber & Osgerby, to answer a single question: what does it mean for light to inhabit a space with intention?
The meeting point between these two practices is not immediately obvious, and that friction was precisely what made it generative. Fashion and light share an obsession with the body: one clothes it, the other reveals it. Both disciplines work with the interplay of material and immaterial, of presence and absence, of what is shown and what is deliberately withheld.
The Design Proposition:
The project proposed a lighting object, or system, that took its formal and emotional cues from Peter Do's aesthetic vocabulary: the long, the draped, the suspended, the structural silence. The garment as a spatial object. The seam as a line of light. The pleat as a surface that catches and loses illumination in the same movement a fabric catches and loses shadow.
The resulting design explored light not as illumination, but as material behavior, the way light falls along a volume, accumulates in a fold, disappears at an edge. In doing so, it translated the logic of fashion construction into the logic of luminous object design: proportion, tension, weight, and the body as the ultimate measure of scale.
The Politecnico as Context:
The Politecnico di Milano provided not only the institutional framework for this collaboration, but a specific intellectual climate: one in which design is understood as a discipline of culture, not merely of industry. The school's tradition of connecting rigorous formal research with conceptual ambition shaped the approach taken, demanding that every design decision be accountable to both aesthetic and conceptual criteria.
To develop this project in Milan was also to work within the capital of Italian design thinking, a city where FLOS itself was born, where the relationship between craft, industry, and authorship is a living conversation rather than a historical footnote.