There is a version of Salone del Mobile that I have made peace with not experiencing, as a deliberate decision of mine. The one where you're at four venues before lunch, have somehow accumulated three tote bags, and end up eating from an aluminium tray surrounded by artichokes arranged as flowers, talking to someone whose name you already forgot.
Milan is small enough that, under normal circumstances, you run into someone you know within 30 minutes of leaving the house. During Design Week, you could spend an entire afternoon in the city and not recognize a single face, which is either a sign of how international it has become or of how efficiently it replaces the city with a temporary version of itself that runs on Lime bikes and Gucci cans – little totems of the moment that, dare I say, have already become the symbol of this 64th edition.
It is not a coincidence that, as AI accelerates everything on a screen, the most interesting work at this Design Week kept pulling attention back to the physical. The feed hasn't gone anywhere, but the appetite for what resists it has visibly grown. Here are just a few highlights from the week:
Alcova
The most reliably interesting destination in the Fuorisalone ecosystem – the network of events that runs parallel to the fair – returns with two radically different venues: Villa Pestarini, the private residence in Milan by Franco Albini, opened to the public for the first time; and the vast Baggio Military Hospital, operating as a city within a city. Among the highlights there is an immersive installation in the church exploring design and spirituality, a design-club-night in the hangars by night, and 131 exhibitors ranging from prestigious schools to independent studios.
6:AM
Milan-based glass brand 6:AM takes over an abandoned pool in Porta Venezia for an exhibition built around a deceptively simple premise: repetition as the invisible structure beneath all creative practice. The show includes glass blown for the Bottega Veneta Summer 2026 runway set, now presented in an architectural formation; a surveillance-camera video installation that sits somewhere between documentation and hallucination; and a site-specific sound piece by Invernomuto translating amphibian ecosystem data from northern Italy into evolving composition.
Capsule Plaza
Capsule's 2026 Fuorisalone presence lands in a fully restored former industrial space redesigned by NM3, with Stone Island, Karimoku, Bolon with Martino Gamper, and a bar curated by Neit among the exhibitors. The theme, “Design State of Mind,” sounds vague until you're inside and realize it's actually a brief for how design functions as a way of perceiving the world. The fifth issue of Capsule Magazine drops alongside.
Casa NM3
NM3, the Milan studio behind spatial design for half of the interesting interiors in the fashion universe right now, opens its own space on Via Farini as a domestic installation. The concept references Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich's Velvet and Silk Café: four rooms evoked through movable textile partitions rather than walls, with NM3 furniture sitting inside as sculptural infrastructure. If you've been wondering what the studio's objects look like in a context designed entirely by themselves, this is the answer.
Gucci Memoria
Demna's first major cultural statement for Gucci arrives in a 15th-century cloister: 12 tapestries tracing 105 years of the house – from Guccio Gucci's time as a porter at the Savoy in London to the current creative direction – share space with a botanical installation grown from the Flora motif. And, most memorably, it features a series of custom vending machines dispensing Gucci Giardino drinks in cans corresponding to archetypes drawn from Demna’s La Famiglia: Fashion Icon, Drama Queen, Super Incazzata, and Mega Pesantone.
Alessi x C.P. Company
Two Italian industrial legacies – one making domestic objects since 1921, the other workwear since 1971 – converge around the factory as a foundational creative space. The result is a limited-edition collection treating metal the way C.P. Company treats fabric: Richard Sapper's 1979 espresso maker in black PVD finish, numbered to 999; or an overshirt in military brushed nylon garment-dyed in colors drawn from the work uniforms of Officina Alessi technicians as designed by Ettore Sottsass in 1983.
K-Way x Forgotten Architecture
K-Way's Salone presence is built around Bianca Felicori of Forgotten Architecture, whose ongoing research into overlooked Milanese buildings becomes an urban itinerary across five undersung landmarks: Biblioteca Sormani, Collegio di Milano, Casa a Tre Cilindri, Church of San Giovanni Bono, and the building at Corso Italia 13. Kite-like nylon installations in the spaces, a free leaflet at the flagship, and a customised newsstand in Piazza Sant'Eustorgio as the week's base.
Miu Miu Literary Club
Now in its fourth edition, Miu Miu's Literary Club remains one of the few fashion-adjacent events that, rather than having something to sell, focuses on great conversations and books worth reading. This year's theme, Politics of Desire, takes Annie Ernaux's A Girl's Story and Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes: A Love Story as starting points for three days of panels on sexuality, consent, and self-determination, with speakers including Lea Melandri, Wayétu Moore, and cultural theorist Olga Goriunova on desire in the age of AI.
Prada Frames
The fifth edition of Prada's annual design symposium curated by Formafantasma lands on the most timely possible theme: the image as a cultural, political, and material force, and what happens when the distinction between human-made and machine-generated content stops being legible. Three days to spend at the Santa Maria delle Grazie complex with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Kate Crawford, Paola Antonelli, Joanna Piotrowska, Momtaza Mehri, and a music performance by Hania Rani, among others.
XL Extralight x Nichetto
Luca Nichetto started by carving a shape by hand from a block of stone, then 3D scanned the result to develop the final object in XL Extralight: a foam material three times lighter than comparable alternatives, primarily used in high-performance soles. Airstone, the tote bag that came out of this process, looks like stone and weighs almost nothing, and its installation in the 5 Vie district traces the full arc from hand to algorithm, amidst rocky elements and a yellow visual thread.
Loro Piana
Loro Piana opens the first chapter of a new case study format with an unlikely subject: the plaid, one of the house's earliest finished products and, it turns out, a more interesting object than it sounds. The installation at Via della Moscova traces the plaid through landscape, botanical signifiers, the paisley motif, and finally into pure textile abstraction. As usual, materials and craftsmanship are worth the trip.
cc-tapis
A labyrinth of six rooms at the cc-tapis gallery, built around a new rug collection developed with archival motifs by Fornasetti, reinterpreted into hand-knotted surreal compositions. The exhibition is curated by Dan Thawley with spatial design by Pablo Molezún, but the reason to go all the way down to the basement is Carlos Casas's sound installation: animals summoned through custom speakers by Giorgio Di Salvo into an immersive soundscape. The title, (META)FISICA, comes from a 32-panel screen Piero Fornasetti designed in 1958 that questions the line between two and three dimensions, which is more or less what the whole show is doing.
Lunaa
Handmade in Milan from untreated natural aluminium by the designer Allina, Lunaa began as furniture for Villa Clea, her own home open to guests and partnerships. The pieces are conceived to accumulate marks, scratches and time, becoming more present with use rather than less. Collaborators include Jil Sander, Le Labo, Nanushka, brands that wanted environments rather than mere scenography.
Cassina x Persol
Two Italian craft institutions – Cassina since 1927, and Persol since 1917 – converge around a limited-edition eyewear collection and a valet tray designed by Patricia Urquiola. The base is made from recycled leather fragments from Cassina's own production and Persol acetate offcuts bound in quarry-waste mineral cement. The collectable edition is limited to 500 numbered pieces.
Very Simple: Kitchen
The Italian modular kitchen brand takes Design Week as an opportunity to be everywhere at once: at EuroCucina with a new shelf-and-integrated-hood system designed by Philippe Malouin; inside Dropcity's tunnels as the week's bar; and at Assab One within a project by DFC Studio and Formafantasma. The thread connecting all of them is their kitchen, of course, as a space that becomes the room of preference rather than background only.
