Radà is blowing out 40 candles to celebrate the past, present and future of a brand founded on the creative flair of a true visionary, Daniela Ravaioli, a courageous free spirit with a strong character.
Well-known and loved worldwide, RADA’ has reinvented itself time and again over the decades, never ceasing to serve customers both in store and online. It also attracts the attention of the national and international press, along with many well-known personalities.
“Creating means mastering the materials you use,” says Daniela Ravaioli. Initially she used pheasant feathers stolen from the kitchen at home to create earrings, assembled by hand in the evening and night to to sell personally to prestigious shops. Over the years, these materials have become shells, wood, straw and other items from nature, transformed into glamorous pieces by a curious, acute sensitivity, consistently been ahead of its time. Daniela went on to use pearls, rhinestones, plexiglass and beads, to create original, nonconformist costume jewellery. Her pieces endow a deep decorative sense onto a fashion accessory, so much so that they attract attention and consent due to the singular showy chic style that has always distinguished RADA’.
For 40 years, this Italian company has represented a unique creative spirit which developed into an international entrepreneurial success, consistently present in the most prominent stores around the world such as Barneys, Bloomingdales, Saks Fifth Avenue, L’Eclaireur, Browns, Joyce, Galeries Lafayette, Isetan, Luisa Via Roma and many others.
On occasion of the brand’s 40th anniversary, Daniela Ravaioli decided to create a masterpiece, a limited edition necklace, the production of which encompasses all the brand’s primary work techniques – no welding but rather hand embroidering – in its creation. A real summary of style, consisting of overlapping stones of all shapes, volumes assembled and hand-sewn onto chains and metal filigree to create an extraordinary necklace with an almost regal appeal. A very special RADA’ jewel the designer herself wore when portrayed through the talent and sensitivity of an exceptional photographer, Cosimo Buccolieri, who already lensed personalities such as Brian May, Laura Pausini, Chiara Ferragni and Mahmood. One of the most refined, most interesting of Italian creatives, he is endowed with unpredictable, glossy aesthetics and a style code that makes his work unique in capturing that special something, the detail that triggers emotions.
Completing the celebratory circle that embraces the past and present of RADA’ is the company’s “artistic marriage” with young creative Francesco Casarotto and his very unique Agglomerates: masks that are an extraordinary mix of art and design, unique works created with products and raw materials, or starting with corporate values.
As proof of the fact that the talent of the young is involved when experience and foresight are visionary and courageous, RADA’ made available to Casarotto materials that had been unused or partially assembled and never sold. This gave him the freedom to express his creativity in giving life to a special “Agglomerate”, a unique work of “creative recycling” that reinterprets the showy chic style so typical of the Forlì brand.
Daniela Ravaioli explains, “I adore working with young creatives as they are so talented, and I like them for their different ideas, new ideas. This is a particularly stimulating project since it uses scrap pieces or items which were made but never launched on the market. This has given them a second life, with a different, but just as interesting vision to the one I would have given them.”
