In 1979 the wonderful metal chairs designed by Charles Eames appeared once again in the corso Venezia showroom’s windows. A brave and revolutionary setting. We were at the beginning of the Eighties, a time when design started to follow fashions trends and to detach itself from simplicity and elegance.
De Padova disagrees: “When Memphis was presented in the Eighties, I was displaying the Herman Miller collection’s furniture, refined design products which are present in several museums, including the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York, and still considered up-to-date. At that time, when those ergonomic chairs that I hated (it seemed you were sitting in the car on an engine) were produced, everybody told me: “Why don’t you display new things?”.  I was puzzled, at first, just for a while, then I preferred to go on my own way”.    
De Padova had introduced the Herman Miller furniture in Italy in the Sixties and built ICF, the modern furniture factory. She got in touch with Miller’s products by chance, at Zurich’s airport where she saw the wonderful metal chairs designed by Charles Eames. She soon thereafter went to New York in order to obtain the distribution licence from the Herman Miller’s manufacturer company. 
"That was a special time, you could feel in the air a research for change, the desire of pure, clean, elegant, new things. Both the Danish and the Miller’s furniture represented a deeply new concept of living the home and the office".
The friendship with the American designers George Nelson and Charles Eames would open wide perspectives to Maddalena De Padova’s visual world.