.png "Milan Design Week 2025 Highlights: Every Debut We Saw (and Loved) in Milan")
Let’s begin with what did not make the Milan Design Week 2025 highlights list: arriving to the international furniture fair’s host city blanketed under puffy clouds. There was a chill in the air, both literally (attendees donned their late-winter looks and showed off their facility for the grand European tradition of scarf-knotting) and metaphorically, as all anyone seemed to want to talk about over four-hour dinners and one-more’s at Bar Basso were tariffs and the geopolitical trade war.
By week’s end, the sun returned, if not exactly a sunny global outlook on manufacturing and shipping. But the industry persisted, with discussions around the potential impacts and proposing ways to lessen them through innovation or a return to older traditions, plus compelling product debuts and enticing installations that offered glimmers of light. So goes the weather patterns of the design world. Here, home in on the rays of light with our official roundup of Milan Design Week 2025 highlights.
Alcova
Both Alcova sites, as usual for the immersive showcase, were packed with crowds. And beautiful products and projects: Tucked into Osvaldo Borsani’s 1945 modernist Villa Borsani, rooms overflowed with the tasteful, including Faye Toogood’s floral tableware for Noritake; the tasty, like Soft Witness’s baby alpaca lounge chair shaped like a camel-colored Romanesco cauliflower; and those delightfully edging toward bad taste, like Inderjeet Sandhu’s Pervert vases-cum-meditations on gay sexuality.
Inside Alcova’s second location, the frescoed 19th-century Villa Bagatti Valsecchi, a furry monolith of a chair loomed over a goth-spiked group show by the great Room-File, while the Shakti Design Residency argued convincingly that Indian collectible design has never been more vibrant. Outside, the nearby Pasino Glasshouses were fertile ground for David Aliperti’s tangled, spiny ceramics, and for Objects of Common Interest’s collaboration with Greek Marble, in which a sun-shaped speaker broadcast the sounds of a marble quarry as guests sat on a grid of stunning stones that was less a conversation pit than a conversation platform.
On the Record
Chat, after all, is a main fuel of Milan Design Week. Prada and Formafantasma held its In Transit symposium at Milan Central Station, where packed audiences explored the tensions between design and the natural environment while examining Gio Ponti and Giulio Minolett’s green and groovy 1950 Padiglione Reale and Arlecchino Train. David Rockwell Studio and Cork Collective seemingly wrung out every possible potential of cork, from lacy wall covering and lampshade to sculptural tree to chair to miniature models of chairs for its Casa Cork in Brera, the city’s design district, where Tiffany Jow moderated talks on the material’s circular economics with Suchi Reddy, Yves Béhar, and others. And discussions lent personal touches to Salone’s endless showroom rows, with Jaime Hayon joining Nani Marquina in her booth to talk over their charming partnerships, and theater legend Robert Wilson holding a masterclass with solar designer Marjan van Aubel and plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso within Sou Fujimoto’s the Forest of Space Arena at Euroluce.
New and Notable
At Salone, Kartell reintroduced Joe Colombo’s 1964 KD28 Lamp, which has never looked fresher; more of the designer’s legacy can be explored at a concurrent retrospective at the Kartell Museum, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Flos worked with Formafantasma on site-specific installations of modular lamps and new collections from Michael Anastassiades, Erwan Bouroullec, Konstantin Grcic, and Piero Lissoni. In a pavilion of repurposed and recycled materials designed by Office, Knoll debuted collections by Johnston Marklee, Willo Perron, and cleverly stacked sculptural offerings from Jonathan Muecke. And Poliform floated ideas for modular seating like a nautical Lagoon Sofa with rope backrest and organic Reef outdoor tables, both by Emmanuel Gallina.
Ready for Bed
It’s a reaction that seemed fitting for the state of affairs: Many brands were taking to bed. This was a trend one couldn’t help but notice this season. Champalimaud Design impressed at L’Appartamento by Artemest with a modernist bed tucked into a grove of hand-painted citrus tree wall covering. Convey had a rumbled bed and crisp sets of percale sheets by Under. Delvis (Un)Limited put Somnia Banquet’s bed built for four in the front of its Brera gallery; each night, a designer slept there before a journalist woke them up for an interview. Marimekko and Laila Gohar went even further, transforming the entire floor of the Art Deco Teatro Litta into one large bed, dressed in Maija Isola archive stripes, into which visitors could drink coffee and eat pastries ordered by waiters in crisp Marimekko pajamas. It was just the place to contemplate dreams of the future—or, if like me, recuperate after staying out way too late the night before, raving to Björk and Vegyn, who DJ’ed on top of the Triennale di Milano.
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