Flos × Missoni

Announced September 19, 1975 at the Salone del Mobile in Milan, Fiamma started in Sumirago, where Rosita Missoni pulled an offcut of flame-stitch tube over a broom handle to show Castiglioni how the zigzag lengthened and paled under tension. Castiglioni took the broom handle back to his studio in Piazza Castello and replaced it, over the winter, with two lengths of aluminium tube from a scaffolding catalogue.

The frame is his: a cast-iron disc base, an outer tube and an inner tube that telescopes out of it on a knurled friction collar, both perforated so the bulbs inside light the knit evenly, and two chrome hoops that hold the sleeve open at top and bottom. The knit is theirs: space-dyed rayon and wool off a Raschel machine, cut from runs long enough that no two sleeves start on the same colour. Closed at 95 cm the stitch bunches and the lamp gives a low amber glow. At 160 cm the zigzag opens into a bright lattice and the sleeve draws in at the middle by about six centimetres, which the Missonis insisted was intended and Castiglioni insisted was physics.

The only control is the rompitratta switch on the flex, set 40 cm from the base so it lands under a foot. Ottagono's reviewer noted that it was the first lamp he had owned that he adjusted by its waist. It sold chiefly to architects in Milan and Turin and, through the Missoni boutiques, to a smaller number of people who bought it as knitwear.

The inner tube carries three engraved rings and a further eight centimetres of travel above the third. Inside the upper hoop, stamped in Castiglioni's wording, is NON TIRARE OLTRE LA TERZA TACCA. Most owners read it as a joke. It was not.