Yes, Milan Design Week is the world’s largest design fair and yes, there may have been 319,400 visitors, 1,900 exhibitors and an estimated €255 million injected into the city in seven days, but the week’s most beloved event is undoubtedly the Fuorisalone, where brands flood palazzos, cloisters, abandoned buildings and historic cafés to share their works with the world.
This year’s theme was “Be the Project.” And the brands that leaned into it fully? They delivered one of the most exciting editions in years. MOJEH rounds-up the highlights from Milan Design Week.
The Moment That Belongs To Us
The Architecture & Design Commission of Saudi Arabia brought Jusoor Design Collections to the Pinacoteca di Brera – one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in a city that runs entirely on cultural capital.
Five Saudi designers showed there: Muotaz Abbas, Aseel Alamoudi, Abeer AlRabiah, Albandari Sulaiman and Saud Alsaleh. Curated by Dubai-based creative director Samer Yamani, the work was developed across Riyadh, New Delhi, Kathmandu and Barcelona with studios including Klove Studio and Lagranja Design. Jusoor means bridges in Arabic and the exhibition presented Saudi design as something evolving and in confident dialogue with the world. The standout was AlRabiah and Sulaiman’s CORA Collection – twelve sculptural stools built from handwoven carpets, inspired by five coral species from Saudi coastlines. Three pieces were deliberately bleached as a powerful comment on marine fragility that needed no explanation.
Also in the city were Lebanese designer Roseline Jabbour at Isola Design Gallery, UAE designers in the Rising Talents show and Saudi architect Urjowan Alsharif at Artemest’s L’Appartamento. Their collective presence wasn’t about visibility, but rather arrival on a global stage.
Gucci Straddles Two Worlds
Memoria was staged inside the Chiostri di San Simpliciano, a medieval cloister in Brera. Twelve tapestries crafted in Florence lined the stone arcades, each a chapter of Gucci’s 105-year history: from Guccio Gucci as a young porter at The Savoy in London, through Tom Ford and Alessandro Michele, all the way to the current era. The final tapestry shows the Gucci studio – and at its centre, a gamer chair. Specific and perfectly Demna: one hand inside tradition, the other holding something playfully unexpected, daring you to decide which one you love more.
In the smaller cloister were vending machines dispensing Gucci Giardino drinks labelled Fashion Icon, Drama Queen, and Super Incazzata. The crack of a can against medieval stone. These made up the most photographed moment of the week – and one of the most joyful. Nearby, the 1966 Flora motif was reimagined as a living three-dimensional botanical landscape that guests could walk through.
The Women Who Ran The Room
Maria Porro, president of Salone del Mobile, launched two entirely new fair formats – Salone Raritas (collectible design exhibition designed by Formafantasma) and Salone Contract (hospitality at scale, masterplanned by Rem Koolhaas) – while growing attendance 5.5 percent in a complex global market.
Valentina Ciuffi, co-curator of Alcova, brought this year’s eleventh edition to the Baggio Military Hospital and – for the first time ever opened to the public – Villa Pestarini, the rationalist masterpiece designed by Franco Albini in the 1930s and lived in by five generations of the same family.
Sara Ricciardi filled the loggiato of the Pinacoteca di Brera itself with Serotonin – The Chemistry of Happiness -a commission by American Express in which inflatable, multicoloured forms gently expanded and contracted between the historic stone arches, creating a breathing, pulsing landscape of colour and light.
The Rooms With Impact
Independent of the fair, there were pockets of creativity to be found throughout Milan. Baccarat’s Crystal Crypt installation, championing the Mille Fleurs chandelier, was created in collaboration with Bethan Laura Wood and reworked the House’s 19th-century Zénith chandelier into a breathtaking explosion of colour and refracted light. It was one of the most visually stunning (and most talked-about) pieces of the week.
Elsewhere, The King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, also known as Ithra, presented Default Is Not Universal at the Isola Design Gallery. The AI-powered exhibition demonstrates how people from different cultural backgrounds interpret identical objects differently and begged the question: whose eye are we designing for?
The fourth edition of Miu Miu’s Literary Club, Politics of Desire, showed not a single product. Instead, there were three days of panels on desire, autonomy and consent, anchored by Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story and Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes: A Love Story. It was an intellectual event where the art came alive through analysis and perspective. In-keeping with the literary theme was Jil Sander and Apartmento, presented by Reference Library. Together, they created a pop-up bookshop featuring over sixty titles curated by designers and literary minds including Simone Bellotti, Ronan Bouroullec, Jasper Morrison, Lykke Li, Celine Song and Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Fendi Had Three Wins in One Week
The inaugural Fendi Design Prize – curated by Giulio Cappellini and with a jury including Patricia Urquiola, Joseph Grima and Rossana Orlandi – was awarded to Swedish 25-year-old Gustav Craft for VIA: furniture incorporating the pattern of the sampietrino, the basalt paving stone that has lined Rome’s streets since approximately 750BC. Each piece features woven leather straps, exposed steel frames and a mirror balanced on a single rough-cut stone, culminating in a work that is somehow contemporary yet rich with history. “People forget to look down at this beautiful road that’s been there for 2,000 years,” said Craft, a student at Istituto Marangoni Milano Design. The collection debuts at Design Miami in December.
Simultaneously, Maria Grazia Chiuri made her Fendi debut with twenty re-editions of the Baguette 26424 – the bag’s original 1997 style code. Sequinned. Appliquéd. Minimal. Animal print. It is a first move that is both bold and apt.
The House also revealed a new Fendi Casa collection, which included the Peekachill armchair inspired by the Peekaboo handbag. Learn more
