“Coloured snakes caressing your hair.”
“Flowers eyeballing you while you look after your body.”
“Hands with lipsticks for your hands.”
If you’re familiar with Toiletpaper, the creative agency and magazine founded by artist Maurizio Cattelan and photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari, these descriptions of the Italian label’s new home-beauty line probably feel about right.
Toiletpaper Beauty offers a range of flamboyant, highly stylised products, from black, white and pinstriped pyjamas adorned with swirling snakes to body lotion with packaging covered in flowers with eyes, and hand cream decorated with a lipstick motif.
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SIGN UPCattelan and Ferrari started Toiletpaper as a magazine in 2010. The brand has since evolved into products – furniture, posters, calendars, wallpaper, clothing – and a design studio that’s worked with the likes of Nike, Diesel, Seletti, Daft Punk, Vogue and Vanity Fair.
Now the home-beauty line is available in an Australian outlet for the first time. And in a nod to Toiletpaper’s art and design roots, it’s being stocked in a gallery: Fletcher Arts in Prahran.
“It’s a brand that’s really backed by prestige and gravity, but it’s art-based, so it sat in the gallery well,” says gallery founder and director Sarah Fletcher. “It’s a little bit tongue-in-cheek, [with] many layers of symbolism, and it’s very smart.”
The packaging is colourful and fun, bold and maximalist. Take the Home Kit – Dish & Hand Soap. Its leaf-green box features an image of a pair of black oxford shoes overflowing with saucy spaghetti. Then there’s soap that looks like a half-eaten chocolate bar, or a shampoo bottle that appears to be raining snakes.
The Toiletpaper team tapped luxury cosmetics giant La Bottega and mixologist Oscar Quagliarini to collaborate on the zany range.
Renowned for bringing haute parfumerie to the bartending world, Quagliarini is the creative nose behind the collection. The Italian created an unconventional mixture of classic (almond and beeswax, orange) and daring scents (vanilla and Sichuan pepper, tea tree and tuberose) across shower gels, body lotions, dish liquid, hand soap, hand cream and hair products.
Toiletpaper Beauty is available online and from Fletcher Arts in Prahran. Prices range from $40 for a soap disguised as a half-eaten chocolate bar to $410 for pyjamas with the snake motif.