Every year, we look forward to Milan Design Week in April – an event that has grown far beyond the furniture fair it grew up around. Today, it’s a fast-paced spectacle that swallows the city with installations, exhibitions and parties spilling into every corner.
This year, as our woman on the ground, Ali Morris dipped her toes into the Salone madness for three days and came away with inspiration by the bucketload. As always, here are the things that caught our eye.
Laila Gohar × Arket
At its best, Milan is about shared joy – and what better way to deliver that than a free, fruit-and-veg-themed fairground ride?
To celebrate her first ready-to-wear collection with Arket, Laila Gohar reimagined the traditional carousel, swapping horses for oversized fruits and vegetables. Installed in the Giardino delle Arti, it was slightly surreal and entirely delightful. We’ll always say yes to this kind of playful theatricality.
Issey Miyake × Ensamble Studio
In the manufacture of Issey Miyake’s distinctive pleated garments, sheets of paper are used to sandwich and protect the fabric as it passes through the pleating process. Afterwards, these wafer-thin sheets are compressed into dense logs and typically discarded.
Determined to find a second life for the material, design director Satoshi Kondo worked with Madrid-based Ensamble Studio to transform this waste into furniture, shown across the brand’s Milan store. From cloud-like stools carved directly from compressed paper logs to sculptural pieces treated with wax, resin or latex, the results felt both inventive and poetic – a thoughtful meeting of fashion and furniture through material reuse.
6:AM at Piscina Romano
One of the pleasures of Milan Design Week is access to spaces usually closed to the public. Private apartments and palazzos are part of the circuit – but a disused swimming pool is a less expected venue.
Following last year’s takeover of Piscina Cozzi, 6:AM decided to run with the pool theme, this time staging its presentation at the Piscina Romano complex. Set within a Rationalist-style pavilion (ordinarily used as changing rooms) with a soaring barrel-vaulted ceiling, the display made full use of the building’s verticality. Highlights included monumental glass installations and a partition wall formed from cube-shaped cast glass stools, which you may recognise from Bottega Veneta’s S/S '26 runway.
Interni Venosta in an Osvaldo Borsani apartment
In 1936, a young Osvaldo Borsani designed a residential apartment in Milan’s Quadrilatero della Moda as a complete Gesamtkunstwerk. Remarkably, the space remains largely intact today, with its original built-in furniture, fittings and lighting.
For Milan Design Week, Dimorestudio founders Britt Moran and Emiliano Salci secured access to present their latest Interni Venosta collection – the first time the apartment has been opened to the public. The brand’s restrained lacquered pieces sat so naturally within the interiors, it was easy to imagine they had always belonged there.
Front x Moroso
In an industry often driven by speed, it would be easy to assume that the latest upholstery collection by Front for Moroso, Geometriæ, was digitally printed.
Shown at Galleria Antonio Colombo, the painterly textiles were in fact developed in pencil and watercolour before being translated into jacquard weaves. The resulting fabrics create shifting illusions of depth and shadow, changing with perspective. Trompe-l’œil effects like these are typically printed – but here, they are woven in, which made the craftsmanship all the more striking.