Dispatch from Milan: Luxury fashion rules the design scene, sustainability is still cool, and modernism is back

During Milan Design Week—which encompasses Salone del Mobile, a furniture fair now in its 63rd edition, and Fuorisalone, the exhibitions held off-site—the Lombardian city transforms into a spritz-fueled celebration of all things design. 

Historic villas open their doors to become showrooms for new products and furniture, interior designers and architects flex their creativity in site-specific installations, and emerging practitioners debut work to an international audience that is eager to discover fresh, exciting ideas. 

And let’s not forget the brands. Milan Design Week has transformed from an interiors-focused event into a significant platform for fashion, automotive, and tech companies to express (or prove) their creative creds.

This year, the following five themes defined some of the most-visited (and most buzzed about) exhibitions and installations in the city.

Luxury Fashion Goes Full Lifestyle

If the hours-long lines, fully booked by-reservation-only events, and Instagram posts are any measure, then fashion brands ruled this year. They have always represented an aspirational lifestyle but have been inconsistent in their vision outside of apparel. In the past, a handful of niche companies, like COS, Marni, and Loewe (under Jonathan Anderson) have created interesting installations. This year, the cohort was especially strong as these brands defined a holistic design-led definition of luxury.

Miu Miu (with its heady literary salon), Loewe (with its intricate artist-made teapots), Hermès (with its color-blocked glass furniture), the Row (with its monastic cashmere bedwear collection), and Jil Sander (with its monochromatic take on Marcel Breuer’s Cesca chairs for Thonet) colored in everything else that would be in the orbit of the person carrying their handbags.

These installations also reflected a rigorous, research-based approach, including the sold-out Formafantasma-organized Prada Frames symposium that included talks on logistics and infrastructure and Gucci’s Bamboo Encounters exhibition. For the latter, curator Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli invited artists to work with the material (which has been a part of the brand’s history since the 1940s) and resulted in the Palestinian artist and architect Dima Srouji’s series of found baskets embellished with baubles by glassblowers in the West Bank, which create a dialog between unnamed artisans and a craft tradition that is at risk of disappearing.

The Rise of Theatrical Experiences 

With so many exhibitors—more than 2,000 at Salone del Mobile and more than 1,000 at Fuorisalone—the bar for a memorable experience is higher than ever. An element of theater and performance defined the most ambitious of them, like Es Devlin’s revolving Library of Light, an installation that invited visitors to browse 3,000-plus books on illuminated shelves and essentially turned each visitor into a performer on a kinetic set.

This included the Finnish textile company Marimekko’s All the Things We Do in Bed installation. Developed by the artist and lifestyle doyenne Laila Gohar, the exhibition invited visitors to lounge in a 30-foot-square bed covered in linens in an archival pattern by Maija Isola that Gohar reinterpreted. 

For Range Rover, the California-based Nuova Group staged an installation that brought visitors into a 1970s car showroom featuring actors that pretended to be salesmen. (While the salesmen were unconvincing on my visit, the Sleep-No-More-esque installation was a delight to step inside.)

And a micro-trend within the highly immersive experiences? Borrowing from rave culture, as seen in Willo Perron’s trippy mirror-heavy light-and-sound installation for Vans (which launched a sneaker whose design is based on sound waves) and the fog-filled faux warehouse by Nike and the Berlin record label PAN built to launch a new Air Max 180.

Sustainability Remained Urgent

Designers have been beating the sustainability drum for a long time, and this year the theme emerged in ways big and small. 

Casa Cork, a collaboration between Rockwell Group and the Cork Collective, displayed the myriad ways that the natural, recyclable material can be transformed into furniture, flooring, wallcoverings, upholstery, and more. During a talk held in the installation, the industrial designer Yves Behar (who has designed a tower out of cork) spoke about how the material’s porosity, versatility, recyclability, and thermal and sound insulating qualities make it a wonder material, but that it needs more publicity, particularly amid the plastics industry’s propaganda over the last 50 years. “Design accelerates the adoption of new ideas,” he told the audience. “Selling sustainability doesn’t work.”

That said, Muji made low-impact living look irresistible in its Manifesto House, a modular tiny home by Studio 5-5, and its exhibition of hacked objects like a birdhouse made from a Muji bookend and wood drawer. The installation debuted at Paris Design Week last year, and the fact that this continues to have a life as an exhibition is testament to its message of doing more with less.

An honorable mention: Ikea launched a new foam-free sofa as part of its Stockholm collection, using natural latex and coconut fibers as cushioning within the wood-framed piece. 

And while not scalable, the Japanese studio At Ma presented a wildly creative project in circularity that involved reimagining what a broken Borge Mogensen J39 chair could become. After finding one with a missing leg in a thrift shop, the designers have become obsessed with collecting and reassembling unusable chairs into new designs, going so far as crushing the unusable wood components into pulp that can be woven into new paper cord for the seat so that there is zero waste.

I also appreciated R100, an exhibition sponsored by the Norwegian aluminum and renewable energy company Hydro, that featured objects made from 100% postconsumer recycled materials sourced from a 60-mile radius of Milan. While the pieces—which included lamps, trash bins, and chairs—are one-offs, they were each labeled with their carbon footprint, like a Nutrition Facts for objects. That’s an idea that could be scaled to many products to help shoppers make more informed decisions about what they buy.

Process and Materiality 

Storytelling, process, and materials has always been important to designers—especially those who cater to the collector market. After all, it’s through these elements that personal connections to objects are created. However, this trifecta seems all the more urgent amid the rise in AI and what people can do that is unique and specific to them versus an algorithm. Human experience was at the heart of many of the exhibitions and objects (and was also the official theme for Salone del Mobile).

At Alcova, a fair of independent and emerging designers held in Varedo, a Milan suburb, Kiki Goti, a New York-based designer, exhibited Graces, a series of vases she created in collaboration with Murano glass blowers. Referencing matriarchs in her family and Greek mythology, Goti sketched the designs through a highly improvisational and physical process that involved sculpting small clay models which she photographed and then painted over. Glassmakers, with Goti working alongside them, then interpreted those images, which had no dimensions or measurements, into three-dimensional objects. Together, they adjusted the vessels spontaneously until they agreed that the pieces felt just right.

Google’s installation Making the Visible Invisible included an interactive light and sound sculpture by Lachlan Turczan as well as a display of the company’s consumer hardware and the objects (and phenomena) that were starting points for their forms: a macaron for the Nest Mini, the surface tension of water for the Pixel watch’s face, and a river rock for the case of the Pixel Buds. 

The Shakti Residency, a new program that seeks to introduce Indian craftsmanship to a worldwide audience, debuted its inaugural collection at Alcova. Among the highlights were artist Duyi Han and Indian couturier Tarun Tahiliani’s ethereal embroidered fabric chandelier. Stitched by artisanal dressmakers and needleworkers, it borrows its aesthetics from traditional wedding garments.

Modernism’s Lasting Influence

Amid so many revivals of modernist design on view this year—including lamps by Tobia Scarpa by Flos, an Annie Hiéronimus sofa with a cult following by Ligne Roset, and the aforementioned Thonet chairs by Jil Sander—the level of execution in Cassina’s Staging Modernity exhibition and performance was peerless. 

Developed by Formafantasma and held in Teatro Lirico, a recently restored 18th-century theater, Staging Modernity celebrated the 60th anniversary of its collection by Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, and Pierre Jeanneret. It featured vitrines filled with archival drawings and prototypes that told the technical history of the collection and a play based on its history performed on a set composed of the arm chairs, tables, and lounge chairs the trio designed.

Meanwhile, the brand Dedar launched a new line of five textiles based on Bauhaus-trained weaver Anni Albers’s experimental compositions. It’s refreshing to see a new interpretation of fabrics join the long list of heritage designs that design brands want to align themselves with, and work by a pathbreaking woman in the field at that.