Milan Design Week 2026 has come to an end. The installations are down, the palazzos have closed their doors, and the city – which gave everything it had for seven extraordinary days – is exhaling after a whirlwind week.
Salone del Mobile has been setting the global design agenda since 1961, and the 64th edition was no different; over 1,900 exhibitors from 32 countries demonstrated why this fair continues to be the most important gathering of its kind. But running alongside it, woven through the city’s historic streets, courtyards and unexpected spaces, was something that felt very charged this year: fashion, showing up in full force, with full conviction, and -crucially – something worth saying.
Gucci had a monastery. Louis Vuitton had a palazzo. Hermès had La Pelota, as ever, and built a city inside it. Fendi turned a handbag into a work of art. Here, MOJEH rounds-up how fashion Houses took over Milan Design Week 2026.
Fendi’s Baguette Came Home
If you needed one moment to perfectly encapsulate fashion’s relationship with design week right now, it was the window of Palazzo Fendi Milano during the opening days of Salone. Suspended wooden crates – the kind that transport one-of-a-kind paintings – moved along a conveyor system, each one opening to reveal an archival Baguette, staged with the reverence usually reserved for a Da Vinci.
This is Maria Grazia Chiuri’s debut Fendi moment, and she chose to announce herself not on a runway, but in a room. The Baguette® 26424 Re-Edition goes all the way back to the bag’s original 1997 model code – the very first number ever assigned to what would become one of fashion’s most iconic objects. Twenty designs in total, six of them Milan-only exclusives, each arriving in a special wooden box fastened with a yellow canvas belt and metal logo buckle. A collectible object inside a collectible object inside a collectible window installation.
The craftsmanship story runs deeper still. The week included artisans from the Chantakya School of Crafts – the Mumbai-based embroidery collective that has partnered with Maria Grazia Chiuri since her Dior tenure – working alongside Fendi’s own practitioners.
Dior Let The Light In
If Fendi was about the object as icon, Dior was about the object as poem. At Palazzo Landriani on Via Borgonuovo, Dior Maison and designer Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance – collaborators since 2019 – unveiled the new Corolle lamps.
The reference is perfect: the silhouettes echo the movement of the Corolle skirt from Christian Dior’s 1947 New Look – that nipped-waist, full-skirted revolution that changed fashion’s relationship with the female body – translated here into light. Some are made from hand-blown Murano glass. Others from Madame bamboo, crafted by artisans in Kyoto. Interestingly, some pieces are portable and made for wandering with. The scenography surrounding them evoked the gardens of Monsieur Dior’s childhood home in Granville; the immersive landscape was designed with artists Korakot Aromdee and Vasana Saima and made the installation feel more like living within a memory than witnessing a product launch.
Gucci Rewrote Its Own History
There is something truly powerful about taking 105 years of one of fashion’s most scrutinised Houses, distilling it into twelve tapestries, and placing it inside a medieval monastery. But then, Gucci has never done things by halves.
Memoria, the immersive exhibition curated by Demna – appointed creative director last year and making his first major cultural statement in the role – occupied the Chiostri di San Simpliciano with a feeling that only arrives when a House has fully committed to its own reinvention. The twelve tapestries read as chapters: from a young Guccio Gucci in London, the House’s founder reimagined in buttoned suiting, through the era-defining tenures of Tom Ford and Alessandro Michele, each one rendered in a craft tradition deeply rooted in Florence. A botanical environment inspired by the iconic Flora motif; an interactive custom vending machine. This was history not preserved in amber but actively pulled apart and put back together.
What Demna understood – and what Memoria demonstrated – is that the most powerful thing a new creative director can do isn’t announce the future. It’s show that they understand what came before it and Milan got the message.
Dolce&Gabbana Casa Said “Why Not Both?”
There’s an energy to Dolce&Gabbana that you either love unreservedly or simply can’t get on board with. It is bold to the point of delirium and maximalist in a way that has somehow remained timeless. And at Design Week, Dolce&Gabbana Casa arrived at Via Durini 23 with that exact energy, fully unleashed.
The new Moss and Gardenia interior collections are all sinuous geometry and enveloping proportions – modular sofas, armchairs, daybeds that look like they belong in on a postcard from Sicily. The City range adds cabinets, bedside tables and the Club Noxus bar cabinet that wouldn’t be out of place in a Milanese speakeasy.
The outdoor Saint Jean line, though, is where it gets truly unhinged – in the best possible way. Sofas and loungers printed in leopard and zebra. Pieces drenched in the Sicilian Cart motif and traditional Southern Italian majolica, the Blu Mediterraneo and Verde Maiolica colourways sitting next to a reclining sunlounger on a terrace. This is the furniture equivalent of turning up to a dinner party in a gown when everyone else is in jeans, and being the most correct person in the room.
And then – then – Dolce&Gabbana put a live performance in the window. Every day, twice a day, The Italian Lunch, an Act of Love played out at Corso Venezia 7: the Mise en Place as theatre, a table set not just for eating but as a celebration of the pleasure of being together. Why not?
Hermès Built a City
Every year, the question isn’t whether Hermès will have the best presentation at design week. It’s whether the rest of the city will come close.
Collections for the Home 2026 at La Pelota – the cavernous former jai alai court off Via Palermo that Hermès has made its annual home for the best part of fifteen years – was designed by artistic directors Charlotte Macaux Perelman and Alexis Fabry as a city of objects: plaster and beechwood volumes arranged in a loose grid, low and considered, creating shifting lines of sight as you moved through. The effect was of wandering through a neighbourhood where every corner revealed something extraordinary, placed with the precision of a curator who believes that where an object sits is as important as the object itself.
The centrepiece was the Stadium d’Hermès table by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby – a figure-of-eight form evoking the curve of a horse’s back or the oval of a racetrack, made entirely in marble marquetry, characterised by an almost paradoxical lightness. Around it were the Palladion d’Hermès vessels in hammered palladium-finish metal, wrapped in leather and horsehair; cashmere throws produced in Nepal finished through resist-dyeing and intricate panel construction; and the H Letter piece by Hyunjee Jung, which applied the traditional Korean art of bojagi to linen voile and cashmere, hundreds of hours of work revealing a discreet oversized H within its structure.
Between Worlds At Balenciaga
The most unexpectedly moving moment of the entire week was hiding inside Balenciaga’s flagship on Via Montenapoleone. While half of Milan was queuing for the next experience, Pierpaolo Piccioli – still in his first year as the House’s new creative director – mounted something extraordinary.
Artean I Eduardo Chillida is the first exhibition in what Balenciaga is establishing as an ongoing series. The name comes from the ancient Basque language: artean means “between.” Between concepts, between worlds, between past and present. Seven works by sculptor Eduardo Chillida (1924–2002), a fellow Basque, were shown among Balenciaga’s current collections – some paying direct homage to Cristóbal Balenciaga himself, two men running parallel in history, both rooted in the same land.
Piccioli, who made his name at Valentino on the power of craft and emotion, has opened his Balenciaga chapter not with a bang but with an inheritance. A conversation across decades between a Basque founder and a Basque artist who honoured him. Artean: between. It is, frankly, the right word.
