In a crowded calendar of global design weeks and fairs, few are booked quite as early as Milan Design Week. Long before the previous year’s fair has faded from collective memory, the design crowd starts planning for the next trip: which area to stay in, which restaurant booking they should make next time, which show they shouldn’t miss, and, inevitably, how to schedule more time to take it all in.
Four days for the main Salone del Mobile Milano showgrounds. Four days for Milan Design Week. Three days for Alcova. A separate strategy for Brera, another for 5Vie, and another for Nilufar, Rossana Orlandi, Triennale, galleries, palazzos, courtyards, fashion houses, pop-ups, and secret-ish dinners that are never really secret.
Before you start panicking that this is another story about how overwhelming Milan Design Week is, fear not. This was not our first rodeo.
After almost losing the will to live four days into the previous year, and considering changing careers altogether in a brief moment of weakness, we decided this year to throw out the schedule. We stayed in an area we barely knew, highlighted only the key events after getting the gist of the year before, and ultimately, I think, cracked the Milan code.
If you Google Milan Design Week, or simply exist on social media for the duration of design’s biggest annual event, you are guaranteed to encounter 500 stories bemoaning how Milan Design Week is not about design anymore. The hardcore chair-and-table people air their disappointment at every opportunity: the fair has been taken over by corporations; it is too entangled with fashion and art; the parties are too much; the queues are too long; the posturing too obvious.
And honestly, it is a lot.
The truth is, they are not entirely wrong. If you are going to Milan expecting a thousand quiet, thoughtful exhibitions, all on the same quest to make tables and chairs more meaningful for you, then maybe design is not quite what you are looking for, after all. We go for the chairs and tables, yes, and the fabrics, lights, kitchens, scatter cushions, and stone. So much stone. But we also go for the discovery. For the hunt.
For every 10 exhibitions you see in a week, especially as people who are radically overexposed to this universe, perhaps two great ideas really stay with you. For every corporate-aligned show you are tricked into attending with cool branding and DJs, you find another young designer hitching a tiny business to a large production line, simply hoping to find people like us: curators, editors, buyers, commissioners, and connectors.
The attention economy is hitting design as hard as it has hit fashion and art. Furniture design is now only one part of the experience of flying across the world to see what the industry is telling itself. Milan is about the objects, yes, but also the shopping, the canapés, the queues, the staging, the mood, the dinners, the scale, the theatre, and the strange collective agreement that all of this somehow matters.
This year, what mattered most was feeling.
Across the city, the strongest presentations were not simply showing a product. They were building worlds. Architects were working with furniture brands such as Hannes Peer at Core by SEM, unveiled at the Hardcore installation at Spotti Milano, and local firm Saota, which appeared in the main Salone showcase with its counterpart Okha as part of a collaboration with Yardcom, an outdoor materials manufacturer.
Countless traditional “fashion” houses were moving deeper into interiors, such as Demna’s subversive Gucci tapestries — a moment I will never forget — or Issey Miyake’s “The Paper Log: Shell and Core” pleated objects at its Milan shop. Product designers were collaborating with craftspeople, such as the celebrated crystal creator Baccarat, which worked with designer Bethan Laura Wood.
Galleries were presenting objects that sat somewhere between sculpture, furniture, and installation, such as the new addition to Salone, Raritas, curated by design wizard FormaFantasma. Rooms became stages. Objects became characters. Materials carried stories.
The mood was richer, softer, and more atmospheric. Glass appeared everywhere, not only as a transparent material but also as something that could distort, colour, reflect, and shape light. Marble moved beyond decoration into kitchens, cabinetry, and architectural surfaces. Projects such as 6am continue to inspire, showcasing its viral chairs with Bottega Veneta to huge applause. Chrome, stainless-steel, and silver tones returned with a sharper, brighter sort of elegance.
Softness, too, was everywhere. Sofas and chairs were fuller and rounder. Patricia Urquiola’s new range for Kartell, such as the AA Land Sofa series, which will also debut at Decorex this year, was a knockout. Pleating appeared as an increasingly serious upholstery detail, adding rhythm and shadow. Wallpaper remained present, but in calmer, more restrained ways.
Perhaps most interesting was the return of decoration. After years of restraint, Milan suggested that rooms are ready to become seductive again. Carving, marquetry, crystal, patterns, and precious materiality emerged as ways to bring memory and emotion back into interiors. Curator Federica Sala, for example, who spoke at Future Talks last year, partnered with Buccellati and Luke Edward Hall to tell the story of caviar in a way that felt rich and layered and full of extraordinary detail.
Lighting, as always, gave some of the clearest clues. The strongest presentations were not about lamps alone but also about atmosphere and shadow. In some cases, lighting was not placed inside an installation; it was the installation. Michal Korchowiec at Alcova blew us away with his “Objects with Love”.
At EuroCucina, the kitchen continued its evolution from a functional zone into a complete environment: monochromatic, crafted, integrated, and increasingly architectural, becoming a site of ritual, gathering, display, and personal expression.
So perhaps the Milan code is not to see everything; it is to stop trying. Choose what matters. Leave space for the accidental. Follow the feeling, not the spreadsheet.
Because Milan is still about design, just not only in the way some people want it to be. The future of design is about atmosphere, emotion, ritual, seduction, and the feeling a space leaves behind. Perhaps rather eat the canapé, drink the spritz, go to the party, and celebrate this multifaceted environment and industry that can be anything it wants to be now. It is designed, after all, to make of it what we want most.
From the July issue of Wanted, 2026.
