Crafting Modern Design in Italy, from Post-War to Postmodernism

The years between 1945 and the early 1980s are the most celebrated in Italy’s design history. From the rhetoric of reconstruction to the postmodern provocations of the Memphis design collective, Italy’s architects played a vital role in shaping the country’s encounter with post-war modernity. Yet as often as this story has been told, it is incomplete. Craft was vital to the realisation of post-war Italian design, and an area of intense creativity in its own right, and yet has been marginalised and excluded in design historiography.

Containing precious metals: hallmarking, minting and the materiality of gold and silver in medieval and modern England.

This book chapter extends the argument constructed by Oakley in his conference paper ‘Containing gold: Institutional attempts to define and constrict the values of precious metal objects’ presented at ‘Itineraries of the Material’, a conference held at Goethe Universitaet, Frankfurt am Main in 2011. Oakley’s chapter investigates the social forces that define the identities, social pathways and physical movement of objects made of precious metal. It presents a case study in which constitutive substance rather than the conceptual object is the key driver behind the social trajectories of numerous artefacts and their reception by contemporary audiences. This supports the main contention of the book as a whole: the need to reconsider, and when necessary challenge, the dominance of the social biography of objects in the study of material culture. Oakley’s research used historical and ethnographic approaches, including three years’ of ethnographic field research in the jewellery industry. This included training as a precious metal assayer at the Birmingham Assay Office and observing the industry and public response to government proposals to abolish the hallmarking legislation. This fieldwork was augmented by archive, library and object collection research on the histories of assaying and goldsmithing. Oakley presents an analysis of the historical development and contemporary social relevance of hallmarking, a technological process that has never previously been subject to ethnographic study, yet is fundamental to one of the UK’s creative industries.