DENNIS FREEDMAN WAS living in a rent-stabilized postwar apartment on Manhattan’s Beekman Place in 1998 when, while browsing an auction catalog, he saw the object that would change his life. Nearly four feet wide, the polyurethane foam Capitello sculpture-cum-lounge chair resembles the top of an Ionic column that has broken off and tumbled to earth. Although versions of the piece continue to be produced by a Barolo, Italy-based company called Gufram — which pioneered Guflac, a pliant yet sturdy varnish — this one was from an early production, designed in 1971 by Studio 65, one of several radical design collectives that formed in Italy during an era of tumultuous student protests. Such groups, including Superstudio and Archizoom Associati — influenced by American Pop Art, the films of the French New Wave and the avant-garde works of the Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco — produced thousands of intricate renderings but were rarely able to translate them into actual objects. As the culture changed, their works, never mainstream, became obscure to all but a tiny subset of the cognoscenti.

Freedman, now in his 60s, was the creative director of W magazine when the Capitello stopped him cold. He’d held that post since 1993, collaborating with photographers including Steven Klein, Juergen Teller and Philip-Lorca diCorcia. Studio 65’s piece enraptured him with its combination of intellectual rigor and subversion: It had a rich golden patina that he found “comparable to an object from the 18th century,” and its back story — of disenfranchised Italian youth tossing aside sober Modernism — appealed to him as someone who came of age in the 1970s (not to mention that the lack of interest surrounding radical Italian design back then meant it was also within his means). Unconcerned that the piece would take up half of his bedroom — he didn’t even know if it would fit through the door — Freedman bid on it and won. The work became the seed of his collection, which has, over the past two decades, helped lift Italian radical design from novelty to establishment. Major collectors are beginning to be interested in the period. The Cypriot industrialist Dakis Joannou, advised by Freedman, has acquired several works, and in February, a show of nearly 70 pieces from Freedman’s collection will open at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.