Milan is one of those cities that, every year without fail, blocks off the very same months and turns them into events. They no longer belong to the calendar the rest of the world follows, but to the one fashion and design move around. If you’re not even remotely invested, booking a flight during that time is a fast track to your personal “what not to do” list. September is swallowed by Milan Fashion Week Spring/Summer, late February and early March by its Fall/Winter counterpart, and April by Milan Design Week, 64 editions in, and still expanding. Fashion, naturally, wants in. Not everyone can design a decent coffee table, but everyone can, and will, stage an immersive experience (and make sure you walk through it).
Gucci
“Gucci Memoria,” takes a look back at its own 105-year history, through tapestries. From Guccio Gucci to succession politics, the ateliers, the Jackie bag, Tom Ford, Alessandro Michele, and finally Demna, twelve hangings, ending mid-fitting. In the middle sits a Flora-coded wildflower setup, scented, staged, and already queued to be cut into complimentary bouquets for the Montenapoleone boutique later on.
Louis Vuitton
“Pierre Legrain Hommage” is what Louis Vuitton calls its latest Art Deco-inspired Objets Nomades collection, named after the man who created the brand’s first furniture piece in the ‘20s. An Omega-shaped lacquered vanity in red and black sits alongside Estudio Campana’s 2015 cocoon chair, the “Cabinet Kaleidoscope,” and other archival designs resurfacing. Oversized leather fuzzball tables appear too, populated, of course, by mermaids as players.
Fendi
Fendi was busy. The label crowned the first winner of its new design prize (young talent, Rome-inspired cobblestones and all), pushed out another chapter of Fendi Casa with a roster of designers reworking the brand’s interiors language, and, because nothing is ever just new, re-did the Baguette (26424) again, this time as a manifesto on endless “reinvention.”
Prada
Prada’s “In Sight” annual symposium, put together with Formafantasma, sat inside Santa Maria delle Grazie, the church housing Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” one of Milan’s most important, and most seen, treasures. This year’s theme was image-making, and brought together photography, algorithms, and politics talks, with poetry readings and a concert on the side.
Jil Sander
Jil Sander’s Simone Bellotti tapped the Milan architecture studio Studioutte for their first notable showing at Salone del Mobile. Together, they staged an army of glossy metal stands at the house’s HQ, each holding 60 books curated by 60 creatives in the brand’s orbit to spotlight ideas that sparked countless others.
