The Honest Conversations are Happening in DMs: Dana’s Notes from Milan Design Week 2026.

Bedroom by David and Nicolas at Nilufar Depot, featuring exquisite hand-embroidered De Gournay ‘Waltz’. Photo: Felix Speller.

Rebecca Moses, Etereo Design & Lucia Massari at Nilufar Depot. Photo: Filippo Pincolini.

Milan-based Polish designer Daniel Kolodziejczak, aka Studio Daniel K, at Le Pied À Terre Cosmopolite at Nilufar Spiga. Photo: Filippo Pincolini.

The ground floor of Nilufar Depot was transformed into an immersive, delicious environment dubbed ‘Nilufar Grand Hotel’. Photo: Alejandro Ramirez Orozco.

cc-tapis x Fornasetti exhibition (META)FISICA was a banger! Curated by Dan Thawley with exhibition design by Pablo Molezún. Photo: Giulio Ghirardi.

The newly opened Dimoregallery sits inside an old bank on Via San Vittore al Teatro. Photo: Andrea Ferrari.

Fluid Re-Collection solo show by Linde Freya Tangelder in collaboration with Cassina at 10 Corso Como. Photo: courtesy of Linde Freya Tangelder.

Kelly Wearstler did not fuck around (duh!) and went all out for her Milan debut — a collaboration with H&M Home unveiled at Palazzo Acerbi.

Kelly Wearstler x H&M Home.

Camera Fissa installation by Studioutte x De Troupe. Photo: Giulio Ghirardi.

Nokori by Giopato & Coombes.

“Silhouettes: Celebrating 15 Years” by Muller Van Severen unveiled a collection of 15 unique, life-sized, human-scale candelabras produced in collaboration with Apartamento.

Massimiliano Locatelli took over the cocktail bar SiMa Townhouse with fantastic colourful mosaics. Photo: Giulio Ghirardi.

My favourite discovery from the whole week was Sarah Espeut. Gasp! Photo: Maxime Verret.

Delicate, previous wall sculptures from Act Of A Line by Marijke De Cock at Alcova.

Polish Modernism: A Struggle For Beauty by Visteria Foundation, curated by Federica Sala & Anna Maga.

From left to right: Sema Topaloglu Studio, Pani Jurek Studio and Elisa Uberti at Alcova.

Reading Room By Sophie Dries For Isse at Alcova 2026.

Seat In Touch by Supaform at Alcova 2026.

I almost didn’t go this year.

The cost of travel, the economics of running a business, the exhaustion of sixteen years of unrelenting Milan production schedules, and the fact that I’d just come out of the launch of Sightline—a half-day design intelligence briefing in Sydney and Melbourne that already contained most of what I had to say about the state of design. I didn’t think I needed to be physically there.

But sometime in late March, I got a feeling I couldn’t shake. Go alone. See it by yourself. No crew, no Milantrace production, no co-piloting of any kind. Just me on the ground, with a packed itinerary I’d designed entirely for myself.

So that’s what I did. Nine nights in Milan, alone for the first time since my first trip in 2010, sixteen years later. I didn’t know what to expect at first, and the initial uneasiness turned into the most enjoyable, clarifying, and consequential Milan trip I’ve had. I could really SEE.

Two important notes before we begin. Firstly, I enjoy the privilege of hard-earned access and refuse to line up for anything in Milan. Period. Secondly, my week ran smoothly thanks to a custom itinerary tool I’ve been trialling — built around many years of militant Milan navigation. It handled the logistics beautifully so I could focus on the looking. I’ll say more about that another time.

But before I get into what I saw — let me tell you what I was looking for.

Milan Design Week means different things to different people. For some, it’s about brands, agents, sales, connections. For others, it’s a junket, a free trip, a content factory, a place to be seen. For me, it’s none of those. I come here because I’m hungry for design. Keen to learn. Curious as fuck. I’m interested in what makes design and designers better, and where the exciting new things actually live. I don’t care if I find it in an emerging designer’s first show or in an established legacy house, in a working studio or in a 1930s villa. I only care that the work is good, that the ideas and materials are pushing somewhere, that the thinking has weight.

“Honest critique is what love looks like when there’s something at stake. Politeness, in this context, is the least kind thing we can do.” —Dana Tomić Hughes

The most honest design conversations of my entire week didn’t happen at shows.

They happened in my DMs. In text messages. In private conversations at Bar Basso at 1 AM, where designers and peers leaned in to share what they actually thought about brands, installations, each other, the year. Truths almost no one is willing to say in public, because the ecosystem we work inside has been engineered to punish honesty.

Dealers and designers depend on the brands. Press depends on the advertisers. Influencers depend on access. Almost everyone whose income touches design has a direct or indirect financial reason to say nice things to the people making the work. So when a brand insists everyone loved their new collection, what they often mean is: everyone whose income depends on us said nice things to our faces.

But that’s not real feedback. That’s a feedback loop. Like the dreaded algorithm that keeps dishing out more of the same…

The result is that politeness gets confused for positivity, dissent gets engineered out of the system, and honesty gets pushed into private channels — encrypted threads and conversations between people who trust each other enough to risk telling the truth. Honesty absolutely exists, but only where the system can’t punish it.

This is the structural condition that produced Milan 2026 (and most of the design these days, tbh). It’s also the condition that’s been producing the calcification I spoke of last year — the archive-mining, the marketing-machine ascendancy, the mostly hollow fashion-into-design crossovers, the all-encompassing gimmickry, etc. Calcified industries don’t reform themselves. They need outside pressure. And the only pressure that works in a creative field is the pressure of honest seeing — practitioners and editors who refuse the polite fiction.

I’ve spent sixteen years staying close to designers and out of PR circles, partly by instinct and partly by design. I think it’s why people have trusted me to be honest with them and about them. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t bother showing up. I show up because I care. Honest critique is what love looks like when there’s something at stake. Politeness, in this context, is the least kind thing we can do.

This is the lens I want to bring to the rest of this piece. (If you choose to stay, it’s a long one — don’t say I didn’t warn you!)

Does Design's Biggest Event Reflect a World in Crisis? Dana’s Unfiltered Take on Milan 2025.

Milan 2025 reflected our broader cultural moment. With the world in crisis, genuine creativity struggles, while marketing machines dominate. Yet amid the chaos, certain experiences reminded us why Milan matters.

La Casa Di Marmo by Hannes Peer for Margraf. Photography courtesy of Margraf. See more on my Instagram here.

Edra hosted the Evening of Honour of the Campana Brothers at Teatro alla Scala. Photos courtesy of Edra.

The Boléro finale will stay in my mind forever!

Three brands. Three positions on the same map.

Cassina was one of the standouts of last year’s Milan. Formafantasma’s Staging Modernity was the show that floored me in 2025, and I wrote a whole piece about it.

This year’s Cassina visit on Via Durini left me angry and sad. The central stair was wrapped in synthetic fake fur. It felt like an attention-seeking folly that screamed look at me in a way that felt fundamentally beneath the brand’s intelligence. Patricia Urquiola’s new sofa system stepped straight out of the 1980s with a thin contemporary update. Gaetano Pesce’s plastic chair release, in particular, broke my heart. Verner Panton’s Peacock chair has also been reissued, because apparently, we have to reissue everything from the past now.

We don’t. Some things did their best work in their moment. Resurrecting them is archive-mining dressed up as reverence. Enough!

I expected more from a legacy Italian house with the resources, the bench, and the access Cassina has. What I saw was a brand mining itself, defended by an ecosystem of dealers, press, and influencers who all have professional reasons to say it’s brilliant. What a shame.

Then there’s Edra. Another heritage Italian furniture house with significant resources and connections to do big things during Salone. What it chose to do was host an Evening of Honour at Teatro alla Scala, dedicated to the Campana brothers, with the participation of Humberto Campana in memory of his brother Fernando. In one of the world’s most prestigious theatres, together with the Ballet School of the Teatro alla Scala Academy, the Soloists and Orchestra, Edra treated just over two thousand of its closest friends to the best La Scala show I’ve seen, closing with Boléro. A brand operating from proper cultural generosity, giving us a full opera house evening. The Boléro finale will stay in my mind forever.

And then there’s Margraf — a regional Italian marble company most readers will never have heard of. This year, in collaboration with Hannes Peer for the second year running, they staged La Casa di Marmo at Spazio Cernaia — an underground bunker that hosted Solid Nature × OMA’s era-defining show two years ago (on the cover of this video). Following that show is dangerous. Hannes followed it by transforming the bunker into a luminous home built entirely in stone: a series of living spaces around a central waterfall. Underground, but somehow full of light. Three-dimensional relief carvings on the walls. Backlit onyx. Marble carved into sculptures of marble. An entire vocabulary of stone and techniques deployed with precision. (See more here.)

This was four weeks of execution, enormous complexity, major investment. Margraf told me they’d been pushed to their limit. They went there anyway.

Three brands, three positions on the same map. Two of them significant, one a regional supplier, but the key difference isn’t size. It’s appetite. You can’t manufacture it. You either want it or you don’t.

How Formafantasma Liberated Modernism from Tradition With a Theatrical Masterpiece for Cassina.

Through this triumphant intervention for Cassina, Formafantasma offered a fresh lens through which to see modernism, not as some fixed ideology but as an evolving conversation with the present.

“Reference Library” by Apartamento in collaboration with Jil Sander, with exhibition design by Studioutte. Visitors registered for one of 60 hourly slots, enter the library, and are handed white gloves (an exhibition keepsake) to handle the 60 books, each chosen by a writer, designer, artist, architect, filmmaker, or thinker “whose perspective is worth knowing”.

“Lightful,” an installation by Kwangho Lee for Bottega Veneta, was the continuation of the Korean designer’s installation for Louise Trotter’s fashion house debut in September 2025.

“Renaissance of the Real” by Snøhetta in collaboration with Swiss artist Annabelle Schneider for USM Modular Furniture was a “breathing” Pavilion designed to combat digital saturation and encourage a return to sensory, physical experience.

Aesop and March Studio (led by Rodney Eggleston) presented “The Factory of Light” — a multi-sensory experience built from reinterpreted scaffolding and salvaged, reflective materials designed to resemble a Milanese cityscape.

The 4th Miu Miu Literary Club presented “Politics of Desire,” focusing on sexuality, consent, and self-determination. Curated by Miuccia Prada, the three-day event featured panels on authors Annie Ernaux and Ama Ata Aidoo, alongside lectures, music, and a new public reading room.

The brand-activation arms race has lost the plot.

Last year, I wrote about luxury fashion arriving in design with lukewarm offerings. A year on, that critique has expanded well beyond fashion. Milan 2026 is the year the brand activation overtook the design installation as the dominant format of the week. Demna’s Gucci debut featured black branded vending machines in a Milanese cloister. McDonald’s debuted at Tortona with a swimming-pool-sized ball pit “informed by” Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings. (Fucking hell — someone pass me the brown paper bag!) Around them, every brand with a marketing budget — tech, alcohol, cars, sportswear, consumer electronics — was treating Milan Design Week as a cultural-credibility laundromat.

I’m not interested in litigating each activation — some are better-intentioned than others, some are beautiful, a few might even be defensible. But the cumulative effect is corrosive, particularly when design is the aesthetic applied to brand storytelling that has nothing to do with design.

I also don’t want to spend long on this, because it’s already the most common argument being made about Milan. And here’s the thing: this crap has been there for a very long time, and it will only intensify. We’re living in a commercial world, and we’re not going to fix Milan. The only useful question is what you do about it. Walk past the ball pit. Skip the queue at the inflatable. Decline the free sample. The work that’s actually worth your time is not happening in those rooms. Choose accordingly.

The championing of ugly.

I’ve been noticing a parallel phenomenon alongside the brand-activation tier that feels like the symptom of the same disease. It’s the trend — borrowed from fashion and now arriving in design with full force — of championing the deliberately ugly as if it’s the new bravery. The mullet, the moustache, the dad-clothes, the daggy trainer. The deliberate anti-aesthetic. The cultural shrug.

Nilufar Gallery’s show (on Via della Spiga) was the clearest example I encountered this year. It wasn’t every individual piece that was the problem — some might have read differently in another context. The problem was the curation. The decision to stage these objects together as a unified statement and to let the show design amplify the discomfort rather than mediate it. The ugliness was an editorial choice, not an accident.

My reaction was visceral, almost primal. My hands were shaking and my heart was beating faster. There was one piece — a bed — that would have been problematic in any setting, because a bed has a job that no curatorial framing can override. Asking someone to climb into bed at night next to something that looks like an alien creature is, well, strange. But the broader experience wasn’t about any single object. It was about being asked to spend time inside a curated argument that beauty doesn’t matter.

What made the experience especially destabilising was reading the curatorial text afterwards.

The published curatorial statement is — taken on its own — a beautiful piece of writing. It cites a small library of twentieth-century thinkers on the home: philosophers and anthropologists who wrote about dwelling, shelter, and the small domestic rituals that make the world feel inhabitable. It describes the home as a place of re-enchantment. It speaks of objects that ward off harm — apotropaic objects, in the curatorial language. It positions the bed as a place of abandonment and vulnerability, in need of protection. The whole curatorial argument is about making the home a sanctuary against the crisis of the world outside.

Read those words and tell me what kind of show you’d expect to find. I’d expect mystery. Tenderness. Soft light. Objects that feel like they’re holding you. A staging that makes you want to stay rather than flee.

What the show actually delivered was the opposite. The gap between the curatorial text and the exhibition itself was the most editorially revealing thing about the experience.

Now, I’m not suggesting the curatorial intent was insincere. What I’m saying is that we have arrived at a moment in design where philosophical apparatus can be deployed in support of any aesthetic decision — including aesthetic decisions that contradict the philosophy. The thinkers being cited didn’t write about the comfort of home so that twenty-first-century galleries could present beds-shaped-like-alien-creatures and call it protection. Ideas are being forced into service against their original meaning, and philosophy is being applied like a coat of paint rather than emerging from the work itself.

This is the same dishonesty problem I spoke of earlier, but at the curatorial-philosophical level. When the system has lost the ability to say that’s not very good, philosophical scaffolding becomes a way to make any aesthetic decision undisputable. You can’t say you don’t like the show without seeming to disagree with serious thinkers. The intellectual frame protects the aesthetic from honest scrutiny.

Maybe ugliness is the message — design as mirror, reflecting back a world at war with itself. I can hear the argument, because the world genuinely does feel more unstable than ever. (Though I have to be honest with myself about whether that’s the world or whether it’s me — I’m now the adult on the front line, not a younger person shielded by elders. Some of more unstable than ever is a function of the season of my life, not necessarily what’s actually new.)

I digress! But here’s where I land. Design is not art. It is not fashion. Art and fashion are mediums of expression, and part of their job is to interrogate beauty — even to reject it temporarily — because their consequences are containable. You encounter art and walk away. You take fashion off at the end of the day. Design is different. Design is what you live with. Design is what you wake up next to, eat off, climb into, raise children with… make love, age and grieve inside. Design is the discipline of inhabitation.

Beauty is primal. Our need for it is not a fashion-cycle preference; it’s more like a biological condition. We can argue about what is beautiful in any given decade, but we cannot argue that humans don’t need beauty around them. They do. They always will. Design, more than any other creative discipline, cannot opt out of that need, because the person living inside the designed space can’t opt out of having it.

By the way, this is not a defence of ‘safe design’. Mediocrity and the status quo make my blood run cold. Unexpected is what my eye and mind live for. Provocative, surprising, even confronting design — fuck yes, more of it. Please! But there is a difference between design that surprises the person inhabiting the space and design that punishes them. The first is care expressed through surprise. The second is performance at the user’s expense.

The curatorial text was right about one thing. The home is the place where we meet the chaos of the world and make it bearable. But it’s met through care, not through confrontation. Objects that ward off harm exist to make people feel safer in their inner sanctums, not to make galleries feel braver about their programming. The bed is supposed to protect you. That is the whole point.

I’m not the judge of any of this, of course. But I am the person climbing into bed at night.

Interni Venosta presented “Interno Italiano” inside the extraordinary, never-before-seen residence by Osvaldo Borsani on Via Bigli—a universal highlight from the week. See more on my Instagram here. Photo: Andrea Ferrari.

Villa Pestarini, designed by Franco Albini in 1938, featured as a key location for Alcova 2026. It is notable as the only residential villa Albini designed in Milan and has been opened to the public for the first time.

RedDuo Galleria in Porta Genova. Photo: Giulio Ghirardi.

RedDuo Galleria in Porta Genova. Photo: Giulio Ghirardi.

“An American Private Room” by Yves Salomon Editions X Michael Bargo took place inside another private Milanese apartment. Photo: Matteo Verzini.

Casa Milana x Beni Rugs. Photo: Maureen M Evans.

L’Artisan Parfumeur presented “L’Appartement”, an exhibition conceived by Antoine Billore. Photo: Theo Bobin.

“La Boiserie” installation inside David and Nicolas’ studio. Photo: Giulio Ghirardi.

Volker Haug x The Future Perfect late night party.

Ten points if you can spot a certain crazy lady throwing her hands in the air like she just don’t care, front row at Honey Dijon.

Mr Volker Haug himself with the portable tables that launched with the super fun party. Photos: David Sierra and Max Bender.

“The venue is the new currency, and access is now the gatekeeping mechanism the marketing machine used to be.” —Dana Tomić Hughes

The real venues are doing the work.

Architecture, the homes and rooms with histories, are doing the real work.

Time and again, I walked into a show, looked at the building, looked at the products, and realised the building was outperforming the products. By Tuesday, it was undeniable. The architecture and interiors community is producing more compelling spatial work right now than the furniture and object community is producing collectible work. And the brands that understood this — that secured extraordinary venues and let the architecture do the seductive work — produced the strongest moments of the week.

Interni Venosta unveiled Interno Italiano collection inside Osvaldo Borsani’s extraordinary private residence (more here). Towering ceilings. Face-melting fireplace. Sculptural timber threshold portals. The collection was lovely, but the setting was the undisputed hero. The same dynamic played out at Villa Pestarini at Alcova (Franco Albini’s only completed Milan villa, opened for the first time), at Yves Salomon × Michael Bargo (a bonkers private residence whose interior eclipsed the work inside it), at Casa Milana (Mario Milana and Gabriella Campagna’s actual, very beautiful Brera apartment, opened for small VIP previews), and at Locatelli Partners (one of Milan’s most ambitious architectural practices opening their working office to unveil Patchwork, a new modular cast-glass collaboration with WonderGlass). David and Nicolas opened their new Milan studio for the first time — the fit-out, the materials library, the sketches, 3D-printed prototypes alongside hand-finished woods and ceramics.

And not all the rooms-with-restricted-access were heritage architecture. The Volker Haug × The Future Perfect Detune party — a Melbourne studio with a longtime US gallery partner, one night only, three times oversubscribed — was one of the hardest rooms to get into of the week and the most fun many of us had. I came for a quick hello and found myself front row at Honey Dijon, and home at 3 AM (no regrets). Sometimes the exclusive rooms are private apartments, other times nightclub parties with serious sound systems and an A-list guest list.

Last year, I predicted Milan’s future would feature exclusive shows — brands pulling back, focusing on who rather than how many, work that required awareness and engagement to be appreciated. A year on, that prediction has substantially come true. The strongest moments of Milan 2026 happened in spaces with restricted access — private residences, working studios, by-invitation evenings, one-night-only parties impossible to RSVP for. The marketing-circus tier still dominates by volume, but the actual currency has shifted. The work that’s worth flying around the world to see is increasingly the work most people will never see at all.

This has consequences. Some of them are good — quality control, relationships restored to centre, calmer experiences, less waste. Some of them are concerning — a widening gap between the design week most people attend and the design week the work actually lives in.

But the new pattern is undeniable: the venue is the new currency, and access is now the gatekeeping mechanism the marketing machine used to be.

Hannes Peer in front of his Terrain ceramic installation for Officine Saffi Lab.

Terrain ceramic installation by Hannes Peer for Officine Saffi Lab.

Hannes Peer x SEM, Hardcore Timber Furniture Collection. Photos: Frank Stelitano.

6 AM’s “Over And Over And Over And Over” installation at Piscina Guido Romano explored repetition as a generative principle in design. It featured cast glass modules, lighting, and furniture that transform into architectural, luminous, and spatial sequences within the iconic pool complex. Photo: Melania Dalle Grave/ DSL Studio.

Details from 6 AM’s “Over And Over And Over And Over” installation. Photos: Melania Dalle Grave/ DSL Studio.

Woodstrokes Table by Brodie Neil used reclaimed timber veneer offcuts bound with plant-based bio-resin.

Third chapter of ArchiThoughts-ArchiTouch curated by Federica Sala, featuring (left to right) Teatro Intimo by GGSV; Openvolume by RedDuo; and Bodega by Parasite. Photos: Claudia Zalla.

Material-led practice is where the surviving creative ambition is.

If there’s a single creative pattern that defined Milan 2026 at the work level, it’s material-first design.

Hannes Peer is the clearest example. Across the week, he delivered four installations in four different materials and four different brands: carved wood with Spotti × SEM, stone with Margraf, glass with 6:AM, and ceramics with Officine Saffi Lab. One designer quietly running the most ambitious material-led practice in Milan right now. His Hardcore collection at Spotti × SEM was the most quietly radical room I walked into all week. A new collection of carved-wood pieces inside a completely white gallery — no styling or set design. No staging at all. Stripped of the seduction, the work has to do all the talking. Milan has trained us to expect entertainment around the design — food gimmicks, lighting tricks, scenographic flourishes — and we’ve forgotten what it feels like to just look at the thing. Spotti and Hannes Peer flat-out refused the entire game.

6:AM Glass at the disused Piscina Romano bathhouse took the glass stools made for Bottega Veneta’s Louise Trotter debut last September and stacked them into a totemic glass wall. Object becomes architecture. They also experimented with blowing glass over old bricks recovered from disused furnaces — fragmented brick-shaped glass stools that look like nothing I’ve seen.

Brodie Neill’s Woodstrokes table uses reclaimed timber veneer offcuts bound with plant-based bio-resin, layered into a painterly tabletop that reads as wood grain magnified into Monet. A fictional, composite “tree” made from the leftovers of many real ones. The strongest works I’ve seen by the Tassie-born, London-based designer.

What unites these examples is a refusal of the marketing-led logic that produces most of Milan. None of them began with a product brief. They began with a material question and let the answer take whatever form it took. That’s a different way of working. Increasingly, it’s the only way of working that still produces work worth seeing.

Barber Osgerby’s Alphabet retrospective at Triennale.

Fredericia at Triennale.

Kettal x Eames House at Triennale. Photo: Salva Lopez.

Cimento and Under (R) at Convey.

Rooms Studio and Sarah Espeut (R) at Convey.

Two institutional alternatives.

If material-led practice is what survives the calcification at the level of individual designers, Triennale Milano is what it looks like at the institutional level. I can’t remember the last time Triennale was the buzziest place I visited on preview day. This year it pulled a major cast: Toyo Ito’s Continuous Present tribute to the late Andrea Branzi (running until October — please go, if you can); the Eames Office × Kettal Eames Houses installation; the Barber Osgerby thirty-year retrospective Alphabet, plus exhibitions by Kvadrat and Fredericia, too. Each one was deep, slow, scholarship-grade work. Multi-year research. Considered curation. Exhibitions designed to outlast the moment, not to be the moment. Depth wins, performance fades, and the institutions are outperforming the marketing machine. Hallelujah!

The other alternative worth mentioning is Convey —its fourth edition hosted twenty-plus international brands under a single curated point of view in a five-floor exhibition building in central Milan. Walking through it, I had a strange, specific feeling: this feels like Milan ten or fifteen years ago. But elevated. More mature and more curated. Highlights included Cimento’s installation by Patricia Urquiola, Rooms Studio’s poetic guest installation, LA-based Joshi Greene’s modular furniture, and Sarah Espeute’s Shirt-Curtain, which I am obsessed with.

Convey matters because it’s where the independent and emerging voices the legacy-tier system increasingly excludes are still finding ways to show up with editorial backing. Curation as platform. Editorial authority deployed commercially. A retort to the everything-everywhere structure of the bigger fairs and the access-restricted privacy of the heritage circuit. I want more of this.

Stadium-d’Hermes Table by Barber Osgerby, at La Pelota.

Hermès conversation at La Pelota with Alexis Fabry, Charlotte Macaux-Perelman, and Jay Osgerby.

The philosophical centrepiece of my week was the Hermès conversation.

On Tuesday morning, I sat in a room at La Pelota for an hour with three people I admire greatly. Charlotte Macaux-Perelman and Alexis Fabry — ten years into their Hermès artistic directorship — in conversation with Jay Osgerby of Barber & Osgerby, their long-term collaborator. What unfolded was a quiet, articulate clinic on what design — actual design, not its marketing likeness — is for.

A handful of lines I haven’t been able to stop thinking about:

“Memory is one of the most important materials in design.” — Jay Osgerby

“When craft is polluted by fashion, it loses its intent. Craft as a trend is dangerous.” — Alexis Fabry

“Design often rebels against the period that came before. Like Sottsass. But craft is not fashion. It’s a need.” — Charlotte Macaux-Perelman

“Colour is a loaded gun.” — Jay Osgerby

“Create less objects, and objects that matter more.” — Alexis Fabry

Practitioners articulating, with absolute clarity, what much of Milan is failing to do. Quiet, confident, serene, in a week that was loud. Objects that you discover in time and through time. Created from a place of sincerity that is rooted. Production that can’t be infinite, by design.

B & B Stand at Salone del Mobile 2026, designed by Formafantasma.

Left: Italian Radical Design’s Radical Home, featuring Faye Toogood’s Crease sofa for Meritalia. Photo: Ercoli Giancola. Above: Twins by Júlia Esqué for Sancal.

Ddee Sofa and Eclipse Table by Kwangho Lee for Wekino, a Korean furniture brand for which Lee is the newly appointed creative director.

A strong case for visiting the fair.

Last year, I called Salone del Mobile one of the unexpected highlights of my Milan week, and despite visiting only five stands this year, I still think the fair is worth your time. You just have to go deep on a few and skip the rest (which is what I did this year).

B&B Italia returned to Salone del Mobile for the first time in twenty-five years to mark the brand’s sixtieth anniversary, and they returned properly. The stand was designed by Formafantasma — the same studio behind last year’s standout activation for Cassina, and behind Prada Frames, the five-year-running symposium series that has become the week’s most intellectually serious programme. The B&B stand was stripped back, modernist, almost classical in its restraint. Fantastic new work by Vincent Van Duysen, Ronan Bouroullec, Michael Anastasiades and others took centre stage. The whole thing read as we’re back, and we know exactly what we’re doing.

It also confirmed Formafantasma have cemented themselves as THE studio legacy Italian houses turn to when they need cultural credibility. In 2022 & 2023, they worked with Tacchini on two consecutive exhibitions at Capsule Plaza (RIP?). Last year, Cassina handed them the archive and Formafantasma made theatre out of it. This year, B&B handed them a sixty-year identity and a confident new collection, and the result was a stand that felt like a real return rather than a victory lap.

Formafantasma can design a beautiful container for any brand. Whether the brand inside the container has substance is a separate question.

Salone also launched a new initiative this year worth flagging: Salone Raritas, a dedicated section for collectible and rare work by design houses and galleries from around the world. The booths were designed by Formafantasma (again!), who did a fantastic job. The show itself has had mixed reviews ‘on the street’, and I’ll be honest — I don’t feel I’m in a position to comment from a place of real understanding, having never attended another major global collectible-design show. But as a debut, I thought it was sound. Above all, it’s a smart move by Salone, and an initiative I hope will develop and grow from here.

Intimacy by Studiopepe. Photo: Andrea Ferrari.

With Chiara Di Pinto (M) & Arianna Lelli Mami (R) at Intimacy.

Three full-circle moments.

Studiopepe opened The Intimacy — a manifesto project set inside their old studio, transformed into a gallery as a setting for products they designed over many years, in a space they also designed. Layers upon layers of beauty and grace. I planned to stay forty minutes, but stayed three hours. Tea, hugs, chats, a few tears too. Arianna Lelli Mami and Chiara Di Pinto built their practice from absolute scratch — without PR, without hype, staying in their lane and slowly blossoming over two decades. The realest of real deals. I came to see them, and I left having been seen back. Oh, what a special afternoon it was.

Bar Basso. I went back there for the first time in over a decade — the legendary unofficial late-night Fuorisalone hub, the place I went on my very first trip in 2010, where I got tipsy with friends and rubber-necked at all the design-famous people on the footpath. This year I leaned in, and I found, to my own bewilderment, that I’d somehow become a familiar face in this circle. Sixteen years compressed into one street corner. (And, again, where the most honest conversations of the week kept happening — designers and peers leaning in to whisper truths the daylight ecosystem won’t permit.)

Villa Necchi is Piero Portaluppi’s 1930s rationalist masterpiece. I’ve visited many times before. This time I went alone — and although it wasn’t my first visit, it almost felt like my first. The little moments of real life from another time, the grandiose proportions, the materials, the lush gardens. One of the most beautiful houses I’ve ever set foot in, anywhere.

The best design experience of my week came on a heavily jet-lagged Day 01 and wasn’t part of Milan Design Week at all.

Villa Necchi Campiglio by Piero Portaluppi is arguably the greatest design experience in Milan. Photos: Dana Tomic Hughes.

Where do we go from here?

Milan’s marketing machine is bigger than ever. The queues are longer. The staging is more elaborate. Underneath all of that, the actual work — the stuff worth flying halfway around the world to see — is happening in private homes, in stripped-back galleries, in disused bathhouses, in working studios opened for one week, in a Triennale exhibition, in the words of Hermès artistic directors. In whispered conversations at Bar Basso at 1 AM and in my DMs the next morning.

The lesson of Milan 2026 isn’t about size. It’s about appetite. Margraf had it. Edra had it. 6AM had it. Hannes Peer had it, four times over. Studiopepe, Convey, Formafantasma and Hermès all had it — for ambition, for trust, for the longer relationship, for the bigger creative leap.

You can’t manufacture appetite. You either want it or you don’t. And the brands and designers who want it are the ones still producing work that earns the trip.

This was the most enjoyable Milan I’ve ever had. I went alone, designed my own itinerary, refused FOMO, lingered where it mattered, and trusted my own appetite. It paid dividends.

Sixteen years on from my first trip, I walked the city alone and realised almost every room here now means something to me. Each one links to a specific memory, a specific year, a specific show that shifted something in how I see the world.

Design carries an enormous cognitive load in my brain, and most of it was installed right here.

Milan taught me what to look for — and how to see — and it’s still teaching me.

Dana xx

Does Design's Biggest Event Reflect a World in Crisis? Dana’s Unfiltered Take on Milan 2025.

Milan 2025 reflected our broader cultural moment. With the world in crisis, genuine creativity struggles, while marketing machines dominate. Yet amid the chaos, certain experiences reminded us why Milan matters.

Another favourite discovery from the week was this extraordinary piece by Babirye Leilah Burns, Ugandan artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Shown at Ceramics — Second Edition, a collaborative exhibition between Eleftheria Tseliou Gallery and The Great Design Disaster. Photo: Luigi Fiano.

Material Anthology by Faye Toogood for Tacchini. Photos: Helenio Barbetta.

Mutina’s Homage To The Square by Albers Foundation Photos courtesy of Mutina.

Belgian textile house Designs of the Time presented ‘Azimuth’ collection, focusing on natural, raw, and earthy-toned fabrics. Photos: Eline Willaert.

The Curated Core explore design as a shared language between Acerbis and Plan C Framework concept store.

[Image credits as noted.]