Golden Goose Brings Its 'Haus of Dreamers' Home to Venice
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The silty and often-misty lagoon that encircles Venice, Italy’s most individual city, is in stark contrast to the remarkable 1600-year-old splendor of La Serenissima herself. The water is devoid of anything interesting to look at beyond a grumpy seagull or two and boats plying their own private trajectories. In fact, pretty much the only things you will see, as you chug across it from Marco Polo Airport on the mainland, are the thousands of briccole, the three-legged oak posts thrust into the mud all over the lagoon. These are Venice’s unique way of marking out the navigable channels to guide water traffic and prevent it from running aground in the shallows.
Symbolically, last week, a life-size version of one of these oak briccole, but executed in solid Carrara marble, was created by Italian sculptor Fabio Viale for local brand made good, Golden Goose. Blackened with a blow torch by Viale to give the marble a woodsy look, the briccola was erected in its own mini lagoon to celebrate two milestones: the opening of the Venice Biennale and the arrival of the brand’s Haus Of Dreamers project at its own HQ for the very first time.
Haus of Dreamers is an ambitious idea. You could get away with calling it a globe-trotting marketing exercise, but it’s too all-encompassing for that. Launched in 2023 as a melting pot uniting hand-picked creatives across multiple disciplines, it offers an ever-shifting cultural quality to the Venetian brand’s global identity, giving an emotional, even metaphysical dimension to the rich customer experience that is the brand’s primary schtick.
Fittingly for the opening week of the Venice Biennale, alongside Fabio Viale, Golden Goose hosted three more artists, including French-born screen printer Maïa Régis creating live canvases by hand, singer Mia Lailani (Puerto Rican by way of the Bronx), and Argentinian multi-media Artist Andrés Reisinger, whose giant pink draperies functioned as a gateway to the newly completed Golden Goose archive.
For beneath all the Biennale brouhaha lay another purpose to the event: to show off the Haus, the brand’s evolving Marghera base where it was born way back in 2000. There’s a library and workroom and a kitchen, plus a music room set up with decks, vintage vinyl, and the space now dedicated to the archive. These spaces from the original building have now been enveloped into the concrete-and-glass complex, which currently more than 5,000 square meters but set said to expand further in the next year or two. Expansion, in fact, has been the name of the game for 10 years or so at Golden Goose, an evolution that’s based primarily on brick-and-mortar stores—149 worldwide and 50 in the USA alone. Expect the Haus in your town soon.
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