Ionna Vautrin

Growing up, Ionna Vautrin did a lot of pottery, developing both her desire to create objects and her manual and creative skills. She decided to pursue a career in design and, following her design studies in Nantes in 2002, Ionna Vautrin designed shoes for Camper in Spain. She then moved to Italy to work for George J. Sowden, and subsequently to Paris to work for Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. Her career took off in 2010 when she designed the Binic lamp for the Italian manufacturer Foscarini; it became a best-seller and earned her two awards: an honourable mention at the Compasso d’Oro and the prize for best lamp at the Wallpaper Design Awards.

After winning the City of Paris Grand Prix de la Création, she opened her own studio in 2011 and has collaborated with numerous brands. As an industrial designer, Ionna Vautrin creates everyday objects with a simple yet effective vision. She takes her responsibility to combine artistic sensibility with these objects very seriously, seeking to bring poetry and industry together. Indeed, it is difficult to reconcile creativity with the manufacturing constraints of industrial objects, such as their materials or practicality.

She says she is influenced by the world of sculpture and by multi-talented artists such as Ettore Sottsass, who was equally at home in architecture and ceramics. Her designs are full of colour and surprising, cheerful geometric shapes that reflect the artist’s spontaneity.

For her Moustache x SNCF collaboration, Ionna Vautrin has revisited the lamp she originally designed for French trains, and is now, for the first time, producing such an object for the general public. She aims to combine the signature forms that define her work with the stability and practicality of a table lamp.