Bohemian Rhapsody

On the late December morning when we finally connect via phone, Monica Dolfini is on Pantelleria, an enchanting and picturesque island in the Mediterranean Sea where she’s owned a home for nearly three decades. Unlike most holiday-takers this time of year, Dolfini, 62, has been up for hours working the land. A garden needs tending, along with palm trees that will require trimming to endure the island’s violent winds. And a stone wall that collapsed from the pelt of a recent rainstorm will need to be repaired before she returns home to Milan. “It’s not really a holiday, because there’s always something to do here,” she tells me. Still, it’s the manual labor and the surrounding nature that gratify her most these days. “I like to finish the day and be physically tired, not mentally tired.”

Her reference to mental fatigue is a subtle nod to her past life as a full-time fashion stylist—a job she loved and pursued for several decades (Dolfini was also one of the founding members of Flair magazine), but one that came with its own share of stressors. Though she still consults on various projects, Dolfini’s main focus right now is Malaga4, a small line of handmade Italian bags and purses fashioned from vintage and upcycled fabrics and trims.

Initially the brand operated on a larger scale, with commercial accounts to several major retailers, but when her partner left the company, Dolfini, opted to scale back and deal more directly with her customers. “Being small and staying true to my identity prevents the waste and overproduction that we see in mass fashion,” she adds. Besides the prestige of being produced in few numbers, the bags, which have an artful, boho aesthetic, look it too. Dolfini recently extended her lineup of crafted offerings to include furnishings, including Turkish-inspired poufs made in collaboration with the designer Selvaggia Alazraki.

If life on Pantelleria is an exercise in surrendering to the chaos of nature outside her door, then Dolfini’s home in Milan—a duplex apartment in a former factory building in the trendy Navigli district—is the perfect counterbalance. She lives there with her two sons, ages 28 and 23, and yet there’s rarely a feeling of overcrowdedness, even with guests over, thanks to its size. It’s spacious, she notes, but also cocoon-like in its warmth and the way it feels like a “second skin.” Though the neighborhood has become more popular over the years since Dolfini first moved there about 20 years ago, when she’s home, the hive of activity outside may as well be miles away.

Since leaving full-time styling, Dolfini says her personal aesthetic has shifted back to the bohemian tendencies of her teens, which she recalls was in stark opposition to the conformist, more muted styles of the times. “I would buy a lot of secondhand clothes, which was not very common in Italy back then. My mother hated it. She thought I was a disaster. Everything had to be cleaned or dry-cleaned several times before I could wear it.” One can see a similar magpie eclecticism in Dolfini’s decor, which—given the apartment’s scale—was a constant work in progress. “It came little by little,” she recalls.

The apartment may demand less physical exertion of Dolfini than her property on Pantelleria, and indeed, it might even offer a chance for stillness, if only for just a short while. Given the many turns and twists of her career, idleness of any sort doesn’t seem to suit her. “Most of my journalistic and fashion career was about change, and launching new magazines. Now it’s producing new ideas,” she says. “I get bored very easily otherwise.”