Milan Design Week and the Return of Play
83 days ago, I traded Toronto for Milan and a degree in architecture for one in business and fashion. For three and a half years at the University of Toronto, architecture gave me everything a classroom could, yet I kept asking the same question: When do I get to actually feel it? To stand inside a space engineered to ignite something, and let it?
Italy answered that. Not just through buildings, but through missed trains, new relationships, and several, (and I mean several), cappuccinos. What I found living here was something I hadn’t anticipated: a closeness to my own youth. There’s a lightness to this city, and when you let it in, growing up feels optional.
This sentiment made my experience at Milan Design Week feel almost inevitable. Again and again, I watched the adults completely forget themselves in a way that only happens when something genuinely catches you off guard: a sandbox, a ball pit, a carousel made of giant vegetables. I watched grown people rediscover something they didn’t know they’d misplaced. Here’s what I saw:
ASICS: Kinetic Playscape
The brand’s first consumer-facing activation in Italy, conceived with Los Angeles based studio NUOVA Group, is built around the ASICS philosophy of anima sana in corpore sano: a healthy soul in a healthy body. The retro-futuristic environment unfolds across five chapters. You move through it wearing the new GEL-KINETIC 2.0 shoe, which means you experience the space in the way the shoe intends you to experience the world: in motion, curious, and alert.
Then, you reach the sandbox. It’s a large sandpit enclosed by 360 degrees of mirrors. I felt five years old again — freedom to jump and run with no limits. The shoe is remarkably comfortable and the sandbox only proved it further; but ASICS built something that goes beyond comfort. Standing in that space, I understood their brand DNA, their audience, and what drives them to keep pushing, more, clearly, than a digital campaign ever could. That’s the difference between an immersive installation and a product page. And they nailed it.
Louis Vuitton: Objets Nomades
Palazzo Serbelloni carries its age well. The kind of building that makes you adjust your posture just by walking through the door, where the ceilings are high enough that voices seem to dissolve before they reach the top. It was the right setting for Louis Vuitton’s 2026 Objets Nomades collection — a presentation that like a statement of belief about what objects can be.
I kept returning to the pieces that refuse to be categorized: a foosball table with hand-painted mermaids and nacre marquetry, a record player that treated listening to music as a luxury ritual, a chess table that looked like an act of connoisseurship. Pierre Legrain designed the House’s first furniture piece in 1921, a lacquered dressing table that’s now been reissued a century later. Walking through, I saw archival silk-embroidered handbags, antique trunks and fragrance bottles that felt more like artifacts than accessories. The attention to detail stopped me at every turn.
ARKET x Laila Gohar: The Carousel
The first thing you notice is the scale. The fruits and vegetables are enormous, the kind of proportions you only encounter in dreams or childhood memories. Laila Gohar has adapted a rare antique carousel, replacing its horses with oversized produce, and set the whole thing rotating, slowly, in a continuous loop.
Gohar has always used food as both material and image, but here that language expands into full spatial experience. For a brand built on the quiet confidence of Scandinavian minimalism, the choice to commission Gohar felt like ARKET showing you the other side of the coin, the art of playfulness. What struck me most was the environment around it: Adults, everywhere, grinned with an openness you rarely see. I found myself wondering: when was the last time I was on a carousel? Not watching one, not photographing one, actually on it, spinning, unconcerned?
Bocci: Light as Medium
Bocci holds a particular place for me. Back in Vancouver, I’d seen their work installed in some of the most beautiful mid-century modern homes and retail spaces the city has to offer. Seeing their Milan apartment for the first time this year felt like finding a piece of home in the middle of Italy.
This year’s exhibition, Light as Medium, curated by David Alhadeff of The Future Perfect, transformed the apartment into a gallery. Each room is dedicated to a single installation by Omer Arbel, built from Bocci’s existing series but realized as one-off, site-specific environments. The hero of the show was the new 93 collection: molten aluminum poured into hand-blown glass vessels, each piece preserving a single unrepeatable moment in material form. Illuminated from within, the light traces the oxidized contours of the aluminum. Every piece is hand-formed using blown glass, ensuring that no two are alike. The kind of quiet specificity that mass production simply can’t fake. The installation will remain open by appointment, I highly recommend you check it out!
Audi x Zaha Hadid Architects: The Origin
I studied Zaha Hadid in architecture school — the parametric curves, the anti-orthogonal geometries, the way her work insists that space can feel like it’s still in motion, even when it’s standing still. I understood it through books, lectures, and renderings but standing inside The Origin in the courtyard of Portrait Hotel Milano, I understood it differently.
The hotel makes its home inside a 17th-century former seminary, right at the heart of Milan’s fashion district. Audi commissioned the firm to build a portal to the future rooted in four principles: clarity, technicality, intelligence, and emotion. Two cars anchored the corners while the structure itself was the focal point. As I stepped inside and stood there longer than expected, the space did something to my nervous system. Is this what it felt like to drive the new Audi Q3? The timing made this installation land even harder. Just weeks earlier, Milan had named a street after Zaha Hadid near the Generali Tower she designed in CityLife — she is literally written into the fabric of this city.
Dimoregallery
Emiliano Salci and Britt Moran opened Dimoregallery on Via San Vittore al Teatro during Design Week, steps from the Milan Stock Exchange. Converting a former bank into a design gallery is exactly the kind of move Dimorestudio was built to make.
The experience inside is something else entirely. Downstairs, not one but two bank vaults stand open. Each one transformed into its own immersive environment, housing works from Dimorestudio’s collection alongside vintage finds and pieces from their Interni Venosta line. To move between them, you pass through a corridor so narrow it mimics the skinny, tucked-away streets that make Milan endlessly surprising. You’re then met with Osanna Visconti’s bronze bamboo cane installation, filling the room with a presence that stops you mid-step.
Flexform: The Private Lives of Objects
Flexform’s new collection carries a title that doubles as its philosophy: The Private Lives of Objects. The premise is that we do not possess our furniture. We coexist with it. Objects become repositories of memory, accumulating value through time, proximity, and use.
Shown across Via della Moscova and the Chiostro Sant’Angelo, the collection moves between the interior and the outdoors. Antonio Citterio, who has shaped Flexform’s identity across more than fifty years of collaboration, is present alongside newer voices like Patrick Norguet, Fumie Shibata, Sebastian Herkner, and Monica Armani. The cloister setting of the outdoor collection carried its own atmosphere. Walking through Flexform’s space felt like wandering into someone’s backyard on a slow Sunday afternoon: Koi fish moving through the water, bumblebees drifting through the air. In a week of installations engineered to provoke, Flexform showed that the highest form of design is the one you simply want to live inside.
The Key Takeaway from Milan Design Week 2026
I walked into Milan Design Week armed with hundreds of Instagram guides and meticulously mapped routes, but I left most of it behind. The moments that stayed with me came from wandering, from showing up somewhere unexpected on the recommendation of someone I’d just met. Each collection reminded me of something I hadn’t realized I’d neglected: the instinct to play. Playfulness isn’t a departure from serious creative work. It can be the engine of it. The best ideas start somewhere loose and unguarded.
If there’s one thing Milan Design Week confirmed, it’s that the most interesting people — in any creative industry — are still, underneath everything, the ones who never quite stopped dreaming.
FEATURE PHOTO COURTESY OF LOUIS VUITTON.
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