Golden Goose Unveiled The Forest For The Trees by Playlab Inc. with a Whimsical Dinner Party in Venice

Reported by Vogue.

Venice during Biennale season operates on a different frequency entirely — every palazzo, every canal, every aperitivo hour charged with the sense that something genuinely interesting might happen. This year, Golden Goose leaned into that energy by commissioning Los Angeles creative studio Playlab Inc. to build The Forest For The Trees, an interactive installation housed at Haus, the brand's cultural hub in the industrial port district of Maghera. The brand then threw a dinner to celebrate it, and according to Vogue, it was exactly as wonderfully strange as that combination suggests.

Playlab Inc. is not a boutique novelty act. The studio has spent decades shaping visual culture at scale — collaborating with Virgil Abloh on Louis Vuitton projects, directing videos for Post Malone, and currently reimagining the Westminster Dog Show. Golden Goose CEO Silvio Campara cited Abloh as a mutual connection and a meaningful one: "Virgil did one of our first collaborations back in 2013," he noted during the pre-dinner aperitivo. Campara gave the team no fixed brief, only a mandate rooted in the brand's DNA. "The priority is to always deliver a message of freedom and creativity to everyone," he said, "and they understood that perfectly."

Optimism as a Design Choice

The result is an immersive walkthrough where visitors move between environments evoking an almost fairytale wilderness, paint their own tree, and watch it get absorbed into a projected forest that wraps the walls around them. Playlab co-founder Archie Lee Coates IV described the ambition plainly: "A set that transported you to a storybook that doesn't exist." In a culture soaked in irony, he acknowledged, that reads as a risk. "We're living in a world that's so cynical now, that you could almost see that as corny — but we're optimistic people, and we wanted to choose optimism." It lands. The installation ends in a dining room framed by hand-painted wooden trees and woodland creatures, long tables buried in foliage — some of it edible. Baskets of asparagus and crispy wild leaves gave way to smoked potatoes with rosemary, then a mushroom and tobacco risotto finished with almond milk and calamint.

The guest list read like a very good dinner party someone forgot to make exclusive: artists Lola Schnabel, Youssef Nabil, and Charlotte Rose; actor Arjun Kapoor; architect Tessa Sakhi; Olympic skateboarders Keegan Palmer and Cory Juneau; filmmaker Sinbad Guggenheim; pianist Alberto Bof; and emerging name Sean Koons. Conversation, predictably, drifted toward art — Schnabel's recent move to Sicily, Nabil's upcoming solo show at the Musée d'Orsay — and stayed there until the water taxis arrived for the ride back across the lagoon.

When a fashion brand hands creatives a blank canvas and the result is a forest you paint yourself, a risotto that tastes like the earth, and a table of strangers talking seriously about art until midnight — that's not marketing, that's a point of view.

Read the original at Vogue.