Argentine designer Cristián Mohaded has long built his practice around a specific understanding of materiality, the idea that a material is not a passive surface to be shaped but an active participant in the design itself, something that brings its own logic, its own memory, and its own expressive potential to every object it enters. That understanding is precisely what makes his debut with Molteni & Co., unveiled at NYCxDesign 2026 at the brand’s Madison Avenue flagship in New York, a collaboration worth examining closely.
The piece is called Corsetto, and it is an armchair conceived around what Mohaded describes as “controlled sculptural tension.” The name itself is instructive. A corsetto is a bodice, a structure that shapes through controlled constraint rather than a rigid framework, and the armchair operates on the same principle. The leather and fabric upholstery are not applied over a form that has already been determined. They participate in determining it, with their tension, weight, and surface behaviour shaping the final silhouette as much as the underlying structure does. The result is a seat that is both enveloping and precise, generous in proportions yet architecturally solid, holding its presence in a room quietly.
Mohaded’s approach to proportion is worth noting specifically. The armchair is defined by a balance that feels considered rather than resolved, where the relationship between the seat, the back, and the arms creates a visual conversation rather than a settled conclusion. Light moves across the surfaces differently depending on where it falls and at what angle, which means the object changes character across the day in the way that genuinely well-made upholstered furniture does, the materiality revealing itself progressively rather than all at once.
The broader context of the piece is Molteni&C’s 2026 Collection, developed around a coherent vocabulary of softness, balance, and quiet presence. The collection as a whole positions itself against excess, favoring a discreet sophistication that the brand describes as subtly recalling Art Deco influences. These influences are understood not as stylistic quotations but as a sensibility, with the Art Deco commitment to harmony between decoration and structure translated into contemporary terms. Within that collection language, Corsetto contributes something specific: a fresh material energy that is sculptural without being demonstrative and warm in its chromatic sensibility without being decorative in the conventional sense.
What Mohaded brings to Molteni&C from his Argentine practice is a perspective shaped by a design culture that has had to find its own relationship to European modernism rather than inheriting it directly, and that relationship produces a different kind of restraint from the restraint that comes from being inside the tradition. The Corsetto armchair is the first evidence of what that collaboration produces. It is a promising opening argument.
Corsetto is part of the Molteni&C 2026 Collection.
www.molteni.it
