Milan Design Week 2026: the very best fashion moments

If fashion week is all about showcasing new product, the fashion industry’s presence at Salone del Mobile and the wider Milan Design Week is all about proposing an experience. The fashion brands opting to join the design world in Milan this year largely opted for immersive activations, eschewing product collaborations in favour of inviting guests into their world (albeit a very well-dressed one).

After a few years of nostalgia and sense-driven activations, the mood this year was a playful one. Louis Vuitton Objets Nomades presented monogrammed artist trunks and mermaid fuzzball cabinets; Gucci immortalised creative director Demna in its tapestry-inspired exhibition, ‘Gucci Memoria’; Valextra squeezed inflatables into its flagship windows for its Objects of Common Interest collaboration; and Marni took over the legendary Pasticceria Cucchi in an effervescent celebration of their shared hometown.

Those with established home-design arms of their business, meanwhile, revisited icons that have stood the test of time, a reminder – as if we needed it – that good design lasts forever in every medium.

Here, Scarlett Conlon highlights the standout fashion moments of Salone del Mobile and Milan Design Week 2026 (also follow our editors’ live blog of all that’s new and notable to see across the city).

Jil Sander opened a ‘Reference Library’

For Jil Sander’s first major outing at Salone del Mobile, creative director Simone Bellotti unveiled Reference Library, a presentation of 60 books chosen by 60 creatives close to the house to spotlight the ideas that have inspired a million more. Staged at the brand’s HQ and designed in collaboration with Milanese architecture practice Studioutte, each tome was placed on a chrome lectern with a reading lamp, waiting to be leafed through by guests who were each given a pair of perfect white gloves for the occasion. From Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, selected by director and playwright Celine Song, and Masanobu Fukuoka’s The One Straw Revolution – An Introduction to Natural Farming, selected by artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, it resulted in the ultimate reading list and a poignant reminder of the joy – and luxury – of slowing down to read.

Gucci immortalised the house’s history in tapestry

Putting a sprawling vending machine in the courtyard of the 16th-century Chiostri di San Simpliciano, churning out baby cans of fizzy pop called ‘Fashion Icon’ and ‘Drama Queen’, is exactly the kind of tongue-in-cheek(i)ness we expect from Gucci creative director Demna. Inside the building’s porticoes hung the tapestry-inspired wall hangings the designer had commissioned to symbolically celebrate various eras of the brand throughout its 105-year history. Starting with founder Guccio Gucci’s early days in London, the 12 hangings spanned various decades and creative directors, finishing on a depiction of Demna himself in a fitting. In the centre of the space, a wild flower garden inspired by Gucci’s Flora motif became an immersive scented setting that visitors to the brand’s Montenapoleone boutique will discover for themselves when the flowers are cut into complimentary bouquets later this week.

Valextra filled its store with inflatables

With a near 90-year trajectory at the meeting point between engineering, design and style, and the first Compasso D’Oro (for its Premier briefcase) in the trophy cabinet, Valextra is something of the designers’ designer. For this Design Week, it collaborated with Athens-based studio Objects of Common Interest to create ‘Soft & Tender Topographies’, an installation that placed contrasting materialities in a playful conversation with each other – as is Valextra’s MO. Glossy black inflatable structures were deliberately squeezed into the windows of its Via Manzoni flagship with perfect Greek marble that created a cradle of limited editions of its iconic Iside handbag, the Iside Sculpt and the Iside Editor. The installation was later transferred to the legendary Bar Basso, a long-term collaborator of the brand, in a celebration of experimentation, innovation, and timeless Milanese energy that define them both.

Hermès stripped things back at La Pelota

‘The Material Speaks, The Object Tells A Story’, was the tagline of this year’s Hermès ‘Collections for the Home’ exhibition. With La Pelota stripped back to a series of white plinths dotted around the space, this was a year of a blank canvas on which the brand allowed its creations to do the talking. Its equestrian roots were, as ever, the common thread throughout. Hand-hammered palladium-finish bowls and vases whipstitched in Chamkila goatskin and decorated with horsehair to resemble a manicured hoof were joined by the standout Carrara Venato and Verde Alpi marble table in the shape of a saddle with its legs striped in the house’s ‘Jumping’ motif. The sumptuous blankets that are the ultimate in status soft furnishings didn’t disappoint either. Handwoven cashmere with ribbed webbing that looked like hessian but felt like a cloud came with velvet lambskin tassels and a discreet resist-dyed ‘H’ motif. Elsewhere, leather marquetry using Chamkila goatskin on mahogany, sycamore and cassia wood boxes, alongside the perforated ‘Confetti’ baskets in Crayola hues, are strong contenders for the ultimate desk accessories.

Marni embraced Milanese café culture at Pasticceria Cucchi

Like every Italian city, daily life in Milan is defined by its gastronomic rituals. From morning coffee to evening aperitivo, how one bookends the day is a non-negotiable – as is where you do it. As one of Milan’s most celebrated original fashion exports, Marni knows what’s good, which is why it chose Pasticceria Cucchi to take up its Milan Design Week residency. Much like the beloved fashion brand, the legendary corner café is famous for its warmth, humour and round-the-clock style and this partnership is a celebration of all the above. Envisioned by RedDuo Studio, the three-month project launched with a very Milanese aperitivo party – hosted in collaboration with Wallpaper* – where the takeover was revealed. Red and green striped awnings, customised tea and coffee sets, and branded bags of sugar set the scene that will continue with live performances every week, inviting guests to discover the joy-filled world that Marni and Cucchi both inhabit.

Louis Vuitton took over a Milanese palazzo for its latest Objets Nomades

You know it’s Milan Design Week when a Milanese palace plays host to a mermaid fuzzball table-inspired cabinet. For Louis Vuitton’s ‘Objets Nomades’, the brand brought its usual idiosyncratic elegance to proceedings across seven rooms charting its evolution from the art deco era to the digital age. Highlights include an imagined 1920 train carriage in a nod to the golden age of train travel and the savoir faire of its iconic trunks, featuring rare artefacts from the Louis Vuitton Heritage archive. The centrepiece was a four-foot trunk transformed into an artist’s compendium, complete with paint brushes and oil paints. Elsewhere, Estudio Campana’s ‘Cabinet Kaleidoscope’, crafted from leather marquetry in the form of a large leather fuzzball table complete with mermaids as players, and its suspended ‘Cocoon Dichroic’ chair, created in collaboration with Géraldine Gonzalez, were playful contemporary counterpoints to the house’s decadent furniture collection and table settings.

Dior’s Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance-designed lamps were inspired by the New Look

Taking inspiration from the sculpted lines of founder Christian Dior’s 1947 New Look, Dior’s Design Week installation presented a collection of lamps designed by Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance that reinterpreted the silhouette of the ‘Corolle’ skirt. It was staged at the Palazzo Landriani, and guests entered an immersive garden crafted from raffia designed by Thai artists Korakot Aromdee and Vasana Saima, evoking the wonder of the gardens of Monsieur Dior’s childhood home, Villa Les Rhumbs in Granville. Comprising pieces made from mouth-blown glass in the Murano tradition in the house’s signature shades of grey, pink and white, alongside woven bamboo in ode to the art of Japanese basketry, each lamp refracted the light in mesmerising patterns. ‘Light projections are as important as the work on the material that gives rise to them,’ relayed Duchaufour-Lawrance. ‘Through these reflections, light, itself, turns into matter.’

Prada Frames took place in a historic church

If anyone thought that last year’s Prada Frames location, a train designed by Gio Ponti stationed in Milano Centrale, was a hard to beat, second-guess Prada at your peril. For this edition, the brand brought guests into possibly the most famous Milanese landmark after the Duomo (maybe next year?), the Santa Maria delle Grazie, home to Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. The brand’s annual symposium, staged in collaboration with Formafantasma, is always a highlight for its thought-provoking conversations that bring together academics, authors, and future thinkers to muse on a singular theme. This year, it was ‘In Sight’, focusing on image making and the power the process has in shaping history, contextualised by the brilliant Alice Rawsthorn. Conversations ranged from examining how images challenge the idea of visual proof across histories of racial violence, war and environmental crisis, to how machine vision influences perception and ‘embeds social and political biases into everyday visual experience’.

Armani/Casa revisited its most iconic pieces

The first showcase of Mr Armani’s beloved home collection since his death last September provided a moment of celebratory reflection at its Corso Venezia flagship. On the ground floor, archival icons – the ‘Baloon’ armchair, the ‘Seine’ console, the ‘Riesling’ bar cabinet, the ‘Dustin’ director’s chair, the ‘Tokyo’ armchair, the ‘Winchester’ screen, the ‘Logo’ lamp, and the ‘Danzica’ coffee table – were placed beside new editions from the current collection, letting their timeless credentials speak for themselves. Above were scenes that paid homage to the homes of the legendary founder. In one, the ‘Borgonuovo’ games table (chess pieces on top, card games in the drawers beneath) was positioned against a backdrop replicating Mr Armani’s famous wall of photos in his Milanese home (here rendered in his favourite medium of watercolour) and with his ‘Logo’ table light (immortalised in that famous image of him) now standing tall as a floor lamp. In another, fabrics and furniture inspired by his homes in Pantelleria and New York served as tributes to the timeliness of one man’s vision that is beautifully evolving in the hands of his team.

Bottega Veneta drafted Kwangho Lee to create leather lighting

Forever a byword for exquisite leather artisanship, Bottega Veneta’s leather is one of those quiet signatures that denotes Italian craft the world over. Under creative director Louise Trotter who started her tenure at the house last year, the brand’s Milan Design Week exhibition, ‘Lightful’, celebrated its luxurious strips of leather with a site-specific light installation in its flagship boutique by its three-time collaborator Korean artist Kwangho Lee, whose artworks featured in the brands show space last September. Suspended over the water fountain in various formations, each installation sends the light in a different direction, creating a pattern of abstracted shadows around the boutique. A reflection of the beauty and endless possibilities of its main material.

Issey Miyake crafted furniture from recycled paper

Issey Miyake presented a lesson in full-circle creation with its installation, ‘The Paper Log: Shell and Core’. On a visit to the brand’s factory a few years ago, where its iconic pleats are pressed into material between wafer-thin sheets of tissue-come-wax paper, artistic director and head designer of Issey Miyake Studio Satoshi Kondo saw something in the way the paper was compressed to be disposed of. Having retained colour transfer from the garment pleating at high temperatures, the rolls of paper now had geological-esque marbling (like the cross-section of quartz) that captivated Kondo. Compressing them further, he created a large cylindrical ‘log’ and proceeded to make the stools for guests to sit on at the house’s S/S 2025 show in Paris in 2024. Fast forward to last year and a collaboration with architecture office Ensamble Studio has seen the rolls transformed into architecture-inspired furniture hardened with crystalising agents that effectively froze each pleat in time. The result? A dialogue in byproduct becoming beautiful product – the ultimate ‘waste not, want not.’

Loro Piana put material innovation centre stage

Loro Piana stole the show last year with its cinematic collaboration with Dimorestudio. This year, it shifted focus to its own craftsmanship with ‘Studies, Chapter 1: On the Plaid’, the first in a series of case studies that will see the brand interrogate a specific object. Comprising 24 plaids showcasing different techniques, the display took guests around four chapters devoted to material innovation, from embroidery to jacquard to quilting, exploring the precise practice behind each. Crafted with couture levels of artisanship, the numbers say it all: the Sherazade Notte plaid, constructed in cashmere velour and finished with three layers of hand-trimmed cashmere appliqué and glass beads, took a total of 1,850 hours to complete.

Fendi hosted its inaugural Design Prize

Fendi had a busy Design Week, unveiling the winner of its inaugural Fendi Design Prize, its new Fendi Casa interiors collection, and a new edition of the brand’s iconic Baguette handbag by creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri. The first has been realised to nurture new talents in design and craftsmanship, with six finalists selected from 70 student applications by a panel that included Patricia Urquiola and Alcova co-founder Joseph Grima. The winner was Swedish designer Gustav Craft, whose collection called ‘Via’ was inspired by the historic cobbled streets of the house’s birthplace, Rome. ‘Everyone looks up at the beautiful buildings in Rome, but they forget to look down at the amazing roads and all its history,’ he said after receiving his prize. Elsewhere, the house’s history and codes informed the evolution of the Fendi Casa collection, with new designs from Toan Nguyen, Ceriani Szostak Lewis Kemmenoe, and the Fendi Casa Studio. Meanwhile, Chiuri’s take on the brand’s most famous bag, the Baguette 26424, was a message of reinvention, said the brand. ‘To re-launch this bag today, to multiply the versions, is to say that every woman can be what she wants: there are no models, let’s invent models ourselves.’

Tod’s drew inspiration from Italian design icons

What happens when an Italian fashion icon meets an Italian furniture icon? For Tod’s Icons by Icons exhibition, it results in four limited editions of the ‘Gommino’ driving shoe inspired by masters of Italian design and their most famous pieces. The lines and colours of the ‘Elda’ armchair by Joe Colombo, the ‘Crosby’ chair by Gaetano Pesce, the ‘Kristall’ table designed by Michele De Lucchi for Memphis Milano, and the Brionvega RR226 Radiofonografo by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni have each been applied to the ‘Gommino’, resulting in a riot of colour and eclecticism that will be available to purchase as collector’s items. The finished product and its corresponding design icon were placed side-by-side at the brand’s event as its artisans demonstrated their making in a celebratory demonstration of art inspiring art.

JW Anderson drafted basket weaver Eddie Glew

Design week wouldn’t quite feel right without JW Anderson in the mix. Having departed Loewe last year, with whom he staged an annual extravaganza under his tenure (the brand was absent this year), it fell to his eponymous label to provide a glimpse into where his personal passion for craft has taken him of late. It transpired that it led him to discover Eddie Glew, a Yeoman Basketmaker based in Staffordshire, who created three handbags for Anderson’s A/W 2026 collection, the Blanket Basket, the Log Basket, and the Laundry Basket. Glew travelled to Milano for Salone to stage an intimate demonstration of the time-honed technique that he learnt from his father that involves sculpting British willow using a shave, a knife and his hands. For Milan Design Week, he made flowers (an extension of a Romany tradition that sees flowers crafted from hedgerow twine using a pocketknife) that attendees were gifted. As the brand put it, ‘a piece of pure craftsmanship, hands shaping nature into art’.

Ralph Lauren Home got cinematic

‘A cinematic journey from town to country,’ is how Ralph Lauren Home described its new homewares collection, unveiled at the Palazzo Ralph Lauren. It was realised in two singular expressions of Lauren’s signature aesthetic that were completely unique and, at the same time, ‘so Ralph’. The first, Saddlebrook, was an ode to the Lauren family home, exuding a romantic lived-in charm with its oak-panelled walls, jacquard cushions upon cushions, and generous bowls of fruit and candles piled on books. The second, Sterling Square, riffed straight off the polish of a New York City penthouse with art deco influences, modern art, sateen bed linen, and cashmere blankets in cream and camel. As ever, each space was a fully realised room where every detail is so considered that you feel like you could actually be walking into his home. Transporting people to his world is one of Lauren’s greatest talents with his fashion collections, but it’s really here that his collections are at their most aspirational.