Marc Sadler

Background

Marc Sadler is a French citizen, born in Austria and an adopted Italian. He was one of the first graduates in esthétique industrielle (industrial aesthetics) at ENSAD in Paris. In the early 1970s he developed the first ski boot in fully recyclable thermoplastic material, later industrialised by the Italian company Caber, where he went on to oversee all product lines and patented a ski boot with a symmetrical shell.

Signature Style

His work grew out of sports design, where experimenting with new materials and production processes is routine. Sadler carried that approach into sectors traditionally focused on styling, combining material research and the contamination of different technologies with an intellectual curiosity and a passion for painting and drawing.

Notable Works

For Foscarini he designed Mite, Tite, Twiggy, Twice as Twiggy, Tress and Nuée. Other works include the Drop lamp for Flos, the Big bookcase for Caimi Brevetti, the Bellevue ice-cream counter for IFI, the BAP back protector for Dainese and the Alu-Kit kitchen for Bof.

Legacy

Sadler has won four Compasso d'Oro ADI awards (Drop, 1994; Tite and Mite, 2001; Big, 2008; Bellevue, 2014) and four ADI Honourable Mentions, including one for Twiggy in 2008. His Dainese back protector is in the design collection of MoMA, New York, and Foscarini's Mite is in the collection of the Centre Pompidou (Beaubourg), Paris.